Representation of serial order in monkeys (Cebus apella).

D’Amato, M. R.; Colombo, Michael

doi:10.1037/0097-7403.14.2.131

Cited by 147 publications

(212 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Concern with position learning in animals has, however, found voices that reflect the contemporary cognitive orientation (e.g., D 'Amato, 1991;D'Amato & Colombo, 1988;Roitblat et aI., 1983). Encouraged by apparent comparative differences in associative transitivity experiments, D' Amato and his colleagues (reviewed in D ' Amato, 1991) have proposed that, in monkeys (Cebus apella), a lucid internal representation of the series elements and their positions is formed, and the animal accesses this representation and scans it from initial to final positions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ordinal position in the serial learning of rats

Burns

Dunkman

Detloff

1999

Animal Learning & Behavior

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Rats were runway trained on each of two, three-trial series consisting of different varieties of reward (X, Y, and Z) and nonreward (N) serving as trial outcomes. The two series are represented as XNY and ZNN. Distinguishing the two series were different brightness and texture cues on the runway floor. Transfer tests, conducted after the rats had developed faster running for rewarded trials than for nonrewarded trials and slower running on Trial 2 of ZNN than on Trial 2 of XNY, provided evidence that trial position, rather than item memories, was controlling the discriminations. In Experiment 1, reversing the floor cues completely reversed the discriminations. In Experiment 2, transfer to NNN did not change the routine patterns of approach that had been established.After nearly a century of interpreting the evidence on serial learning in humans from the perspective of theories that emphasized the interconnections or associations among the items in a serial list, theoretical efforts shifted (Bower, 1971;Ebenholtz, 1972). The new effort featured not the items themselves but the positions they occupy in the list. That information about the ordinal position ofa list item may be a basis for serial learning came primarily from experiments examining transfer to lists in which originallist items occupied either the same position or different positions (Ebenholtz, 1972).As was the case in the study of serial learning with humans, appreciation for the role played by position information in animal learning trailed an initial theoretical effort that focused attention on the interitem associations animals might form when routinely confronted with consistent sequences (e.g., Capaldi, 1967Capaldi, , 1994Capaldi & Molina, 1979). In one example ofa serial procedure with animals, rats were trained on a pair of three-trial series of rewards in a runway (Burns, Wiley, & Payne, 1986). The series were distinguished by differing trial outcomes, one series ending with a rewarded trial (R), the other ending with nonreward (N). Only the initial trials of the series were the same; the first was always rewarded, the second was not, so the series may be represented RNR and RNN. The runway floor, which could be made smooth and black or rough and white, was used as a condition to differentiate the two series. In this experiment, and in others like it (e.g., Burns, Wiley, & Stephens, 1986;Capaldi, Nawrocki, & Verry, 1983), a couple of interesting results occurred. The rats learned to approach the goal on all trials of both series in a manner that was generally in accord with the reward outcome: They ran faster to rewards than to nonrewards. Their approach was slower on Trial 2, however, if Trial 3 was not rewarded (i.e., slower on Trial 20fRNN than on Trial 2 of RNR).The theoretical analysis offered by Burns, Wiley, and Payne (1986) for this pair offindings stressed the learning ofthe ordinal position for the items in the series. Sources of stimulation correlated with item position were considered to be conditioned to running by the reward out...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ordinal position in the serial learning of rats

Burns

Dunkman

Detloff

1999

Animal Learning & Behavior

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“…Previous experiments have shown that monkeys acquire knowledge of the ordinal position of list items following training on a single 5-item list (D'Amato & Colombo, 1988) or training on multiple lists containing 3 or 4 items (Chen, Swartz, & Terrace, 1997;Orlov, Yakovlev, Hochstein, & Zohary, 2000). In the present experiment, knowledge of ordinal position was evaluated by a 2-item-subset test that was derived from all 28 of the photographs used to construct the four 7-item lists.…”

Section: Evaluating Knowledge Of Ordinal Position Of List Itemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Serial Expertise of Rhesus Macaques

2003

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“…Thus chunking is viewed as mediated through a higher order cognitive process that reduces the actual load of working memory. The evidence on the facilitation of both acquisition and performance suggests that subjects are 'seeking' for a rule based organization of a serial task, be it in sequence discrimination, sequence production or stimulus tracking paradigms (Hulse 1978, D'Amato and Colombo 1988, Dallal and Meck 1990, Fountain and Annau 1990, Terrace 1991. During song learning the success of pattern acquisition seems not to be based on such rule based coding: subjects did not imitate more songs from the strings which they had chunked according to experimental structure than from the string where cueing was not successful (experiment III).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Approaches to the mechanisms of song memorization and singing provide evidence for a procedural memory

Hultsch

Todt

2004

An. Acad. Bras. Ciênc.

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There is growing evidence that, during song learning, birds do not only acquire 'what to sing' (the inventory of behavior), but also 'how to sing' (the singing program), including order-features of song sequencing. Common Nightingales Luscinia megarhynchos acquire such serial information by segmenting long strings of heard songs into smaller subsets or packages, by a process reminiscent of the chunking of information as a coding mechanism in short term memory. Here we report three tutoring experiments on nightingales that examined whether such 'chunking' was susceptible to experimental cueing. The experiments tested whether (1) 'temporal phrasing' (silent intersong intervals spaced out at particular positions of a tutored string), or (2) 'stimulus novelty' (groups of novel song-types added to a basic string), or (3) 'pattern similarity' in the phonetic structure of songs (here: sharing of song initials) would induce package boundaries (or chunking) at the manipulated sequential positions. The results revealed cueing effects in experiments (1) and (2) but not in experiment (3). The finding that birds used temporal variables as cues for chunking does not require the assumption that package formation is a cognitive strategy. Rather, it points towards a mechanism of procedural memory operating in the song acquisition of birds.

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Representation of serial order in monkeys (Cebus apella).

Cited by 147 publications

References 17 publications

Ordinal position in the serial learning of rats

Ordinal position in the serial learning of rats

Serial Expertise of Rhesus Macaques

Approaches to the mechanisms of song memorization and singing provide evidence for a procedural memory

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