Animal Learning:

Associative or Cognitive?

Environment Behavior

Environment Behavior

The Mind

mental representations

Learning/Behavioral Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

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 stimulus-

response 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 sensory-motor terms (Hunter, 1913, p. 21).

Representational Systems Require:

An orderly mapping between the Represented and Representing worlds

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

C.R. Gallistel

A Classic Hunter Experiment

I shall run around the circle 5 times in order to procure a morsel of food.

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

Following discovery of 3rd baited pole

Following discovery of 2nd baited pole

chance

actual

chance

actual

Summary

• SR 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

Working

Short-Term

Long-Term

Episodic

Semantic

“Habits”

Motor Skills

Classical Conditioning

Operant Conditioning

Requires practice, many trials

“1-trial” learning

Working Memory in Rodents

Radial-Arm Maze (Olton & Samuelson)

How to solve it:

Random choice

Odor Trail

Response Chaining

*Memory

Control Procedures

Rotate and unblock

Forced Choice Phase Free-Choice Phase

1

2

3

4

5

67

8

4

5

6

7

8

12

3

Do rats use prospective encoding or retrospective encoding?

Let rat visit N arms

4

5

6

8

12

3 7

WAIT

4

5

6

8

12

3 7

Return rat to maze

Results

# choices before break

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Performance after break

lo

hi

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?

Mental Representations

Procedural memory

Working Memory

Retrospective encoding

Prospective encoding

Long-term memory

Episodic memory

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 pipe-cleaners 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.