Transcript Radial-Arm Maze (Olton & Samuelson)

Animal Learning:
Associative or Cognitive?
Learning/Behavioral Psychology
Environment
Behavior
Cognitive Psychology
The Mind
Environment
mental
representations
Behavior
Arguments against cognitive
approach
• Philosophical:
– Positing internal processes doesn’t add information
– Infinite # of cognitive models for any one phenomenon
– Purpose is to predict and control; what good do
cognitive models do?
• Empirical (testable):
– All behavior can be explained in terms of stimulusresponse learning
HUNTER ON
“REPRESENTATIONS”
...If comparative psychology is to
postulate a representative fact, ...it is
necessary that the stimulus
represented be absent at the moment
of the response. If it is not absent, the
reaction may be stated in sensorymotor terms (Hunter, 1913, p. 21).
Representational Systems Require:
An orderly mapping between the
Represented and Representing worlds
C.R. Gallistel
A mental representation is a system of
symbols, conscious or unconscious, that are
isomorphic to some aspect of the environment,
used to make behavior-generating decisions
that anticipate events and relations in that
environment
A Classic Hunter Experiment
Food
I shall run around
the circle 5 times
in order to
procure a morsel
of food.
Another Attack on S-R Theory
Edward Tolman
The Pole Maze
Brown & Terrinoni (1996)
Pole Box: Analysis
Hmm…Where
shall I go next?
Pole Box Results
actual
chance
Following
discovery of
2nd baited pole
actual
Following
discovery of 3rd
baited pole
chance
Summary
• SR theories cannot account for all of
animal learning
• Animals do have mental representations
So… what kinds of representations do they
have?
Types of Human Memory
Procedural
Declarative
Requires practice,
many trials
“1-trial” learning
“Habits”
Working
Motor Skills
Short-Term
Classical
Conditioning
Long-Term
Operant
Conditioning
Episodic
Semantic
Working Memory in Rodents
Radial-Arm Maze (Olton & Samuelson)
How to solve it:
Random choice
Odor Trail
Response Chaining
*Memory
Control Procedures
Forced Choice Phase
Free-Choice Phase
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4
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Rotate and unblock
Do rats use prospective encoding
or retrospective encoding?
Let rat visit N arms
WAIT
Return rat to maze
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2
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Results
hi
Performance
after break
lo
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2
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# choices before break
7
8
A key feature of working
memory is rehearsal.
Do animals engage in rehearsal?
Delayed-Matching-to-Sample
Memory
Rehearsal?
On probe trials
give the
recognition test
here
Do animals have long-term
memory?
Clark’s Nutcracker
Pine seeds stored in the ground for later consumption.
~5000 caches of 5-10 seeds each.
Spread over a wide area (up to 20 × 20 km).
Store more than their actual needs (20–25k seeds per bird!)
Remarkable long-term spatial memory:
Relocate caches of seeds up to nine months later.
Cache sites often buried under up to a meter of snow.
Do animals have episodic
memory?
(Memory of events and their times and places)
Western Scrub-Jay in the lab of Nicola Clayton
Clayton’s episodic memory task
Worms taste better than peanuts, but worms go bad…
Clayton’s Results
Summary: What have non-human
animals got?

Procedural memory

Working Memory

Retrospective encoding 
Prospective encoding 
Long-term memory

Episodic memory

Mental Representations
Semantic memory
?
Tool Use
“This occurred on the fifth trial of
an experiment in which the crows
had to choose between a hooked and
a straight wire and only after the
hooked wire had been removed by
the other subject (a male). The
animals had prior experience with
the apparatus, but their only
previous experience with pliant
material was 1 hour of free
manipulation with flexible pipecleaners a year before this
experiment, and they were not
familiar with wire.”
Numerosity
Basic paradigm: Touching stimuli in numerical order
produces a reward.
Numerosity (Brannon & Terrace, 1998)
Test with novel stimuli
Conclusions
• S-R accounts are not sufficient
• Animals can represent abstract properties of
stimuli and the relations among stimuli
• The cognitive differences between humans
and other species are unclear.