Serial Expertise of Rhesus Macaques

Terrace, H. S.; Son, Lisa K.; Brannon, Elizabeth M.

doi:10.1111/1467-9280.01420

Cited by 141 publications

(151 citation statements)

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“…Recently, researchers have shown that rhesus monkeys can learn a sequence of arbitrary images and subsequently apply that knowledge to answer new questions about that sequence (40). The experiments of series III demonstrate that honey bees possess a similar capability but in a simpler form.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Visual working memory in decision making by honey bees

Zhang

Bock

et al. 2005

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

140

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The robustness and plasticity of working memory were investigated in honey bees by using a delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) paradigm. The findings are summarized as follows: first, performance in the DMTS task decreases as the duration between the presentation of the sample stimulus and the presentation of the comparison stimuli is increased. This decrease is well approximated by an exponential decay function. Performance is significantly better than random-choice level even at delays as long as 5 sec and is reduced to random-choice levels at an average delay time of 8.68 ؎ 0.06 sec. Second, when the DMTS task involves two samples (one relevant, the other irrelevant), bees can be trained to learn to use the relevant sample to perform the task if (i) the relevant sample is always at a fixed position, or (ii) the relevant sample always has the same place in the sequence of presentation (always first or always second). Bees that have learned to use the relevant sample and to ignore the irrelevant sample can generalize this learning, and apply it to novel sets of sample and comparison stimuli that they have never previously encountered. The findings point to a remarkably robust, and yet plastic, working memory in the honey bee.honey bee learning ͉ matching-to-sample ͉ maze ͉ tunnel

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Visual working memory in decision making by honey bees

Zhang

Bock

et al. 2005

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

140

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“…of human cognitive phenomena that are beyond the scope of traditional chaining theory. These include serial expertise [15], knowledge of the ordinal position of list items [15][16][17], numerical sequences [18][19][20] and distance and magnitude effects [21][22][23]. This article will summarize some recent research on those topics and indicate how it has led to animal models of cognitive phenomena that, until recently, have been regarded as exclusively human.…”

Section: Simultaneous Chaining Paradigm (Scp)mentioning

confidence: 99%

The simultaneous chain: a new approach to serial learning

Terrace

2005

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

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103

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Recent advances have allowed the application of behaviorism's rigor to the control of complex cognitive tasks in animals. This article examines recent research on serially organized behavior in animals. 'Chaining theory', the traditional approach to the study of such behavior, reduces intelligent action to sequences of discrete stimulus-response units in which each overt response is evoked by a particular stimulus. However, such theories are too weak to explain many forms of serially organized cognition, both in humans and animals. By training non-human primates to produce arbitrary sequences that cannot be learned as chains of particular motor responses, the simultaneous chaining paradigm has overcome limitations of chaining theory in experiments on serial expertise, the use of numerical rules, knowledge of ordinal position, and distance and magnitude effects. IntroductionThe psychology of the conditioned response is arguably behaviorism's major achievement. Sophisticated theories of conditioning [1] have been applied to a wide range of behavior and those principles have led to the discovery of neural mechanisms of conditioned behavior at cortical [2], sub-cortical [3] and cellular [4] levels of the brain. Unfortunately for behaviorism, its major achievement exposed its major limitation. Intelligent behavior is greater than the sum of discrete conditioned responses. Although it was once hoped that chaining theory could explain how individually conditioned responses could be linked together to form complex sequences [5], there is ample theoretical and empirical evidence that many forms of serially organized behavior are beyond its grasp (see Box 1). What is needed is an animal model of serially organized behavior that is based on learning ordinal relationships between stimuli rather than on the conditioning of new responses.One of the main attractions of behaviorism is its rigorous, non-verbal methodology. There is, however, nothing inherent in that methodology that restricts its application to research on conditioning. Recent advances in technology have facilitated the application of behaviorism's rigor to the control of complex cognitive tasks in animals [6]; for example, concept formation [7], timing [8],

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“…Details of this training can be found in Terrace, Son, and Brannon (2003). Prospero was also trained on a sequential match-to-sample task in which the stimuli were photographs.…”

Section: Previous Trainingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of reference points in ordinal numerical comparisons by rhesus macaques (macaca mulatta).

Brannon

Cantlon

Terrace

2006

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes

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Two experiments examined ordinal numerical knowledge in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Experiment 1 replicated the finding (E. M. Brannon & H. S. Terrace, 2000) that monkeys trained to respond in descending numerical order (4333231) did not generalize the descending rule to the novel values 5-9 in contrast to monkeys trained to respond in ascending order. Experiment 2 examined whether the failure to generalize a descending rule was due to the direction of the training sequence or to the specific values used in the training sequence. Results implicated 3 factors that characterize a monkey's numerical comparison process: Weber's law, knowledge of ordinal direction, and a comparison of each value in a test pair with the reference point established by the first value of the training sequence.Keywords: Weber's law, ordinal numerical knowledge, visual arrays, numerical representations, animal cognition How animals represent number is an important question that has recently stimulated much research by investigators of animal cognition, cognitive development, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Since the discredited claims that a horse named Clever Hans could count and perform long division, many experiments have carefully documented the actual numerical abilities of many different nonhuman species (for reviews see Brannon & Roitman, 2003;Brannon, 2005). Examples include studies that show that animals can learn the relation between arbitrary symbols and numerosities (e.g., Boysen & Berntson, 1989;Matsuzawa, 1985;Pepperberg, 1987;Washburn & Rumbaugh, 1991;Xia, Siemann, & Delius, 2000), that animals can compare the relative numerosity of visual stimuli (e.g., Brannon & Terrace, 1998Smith, Piel, & Candland, 2003; Judge, Evans, & Vyas, 2005), that animals can perform operations analogous to addition (e.g., Boysen & Berntson, 1989;Olthof, Iden, & Roberts, 1997), that animals may represent number abstractly without regard to the modality in which stimuli are presented (Church & Meck, 1984;Jordan, Brannon, Logothetis, & Ghazanfar, 2005), and that monkeys spontaneously track small numbers of objects by using object file representations (Hauser, Carey, & Hauser, 2000;Hauser & Carey, 2003;Hauser, MacNeilage, & Ware, 1996).Here we focus on the following question: How do rhesus monkeys compare the numerical values of two or more visual arrays?In previous work, we demonstrated that rhesus monkeys have the capacity to represent ordinal relations (Brannon & Terrace, 1998. Two rhesus monkeys, Rosencrantz and Macduff, were first trained to respond in ascending order to exemplars of the numerosities 1-4. They were then tested with all possible pairs of the numerosities 1-9. We hypothesized that if the monkeys had learned an ordinal ascending rule for one set of numerosities (1-2-3-4), they should be able to extrapolate that rule to novel numerical values outside the range in which they were originally trained (i.e., 5-6 -7-8 -9).We took three precautions to ensure that our subjects used a numerical rule to order the stim...

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Serial Expertise of Rhesus Macaques

Abstract: Abstract-

Cited by 141 publications

References 32 publications

Visual working memory in decision making by honey bees

Visual working memory in decision making by honey bees

The simultaneous chain: a new approach to serial learning

The role of reference points in ordinal numerical comparisons by rhesus macaques (macaca mulatta).

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