1. Associative or Cognitive?
Animal Learning:
Associative or Cognitive?

2. Learning/Behavioral Psychology
Environment
Behavior
Cognitive Psychology
The Mind
mental representations
Cognitive approach says that in order to understand how an animal will behave, we need to know how information about the world is represented in the brain. The crucial difference is that in CP we posit complex mental representations.
Environment
Behavior

3. 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
There’s always a stimulus.

4. 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).

5. 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

6. A Classic Hunter Experiment
Food
I shall run around the circle 5 times in order to procure a morsel of food.

7. Another Attack on S-R Theory
Tolman’s explanation: Rats form a cognitive map of the environment.
Edward Tolman

8. The Pole Maze Brown & Terrinoni (1996)
Can rats represent spatial relations?
Brown & Terrinoni (1996)

10. Pole Box: Analysis
Hmm…Where shall I go next?

11. Pole Box Results Following discovery of 2nd baited pole
actual
chance
Following discovery of 2nd baited pole
actual
Following discovery of 3rd baited pole
chance

12. Summary SR theories cannot account for all of animal learning
Animals do have mental representations
So… what kinds of representations do they have?

13. Types of Human Memory Procedural Declarative
Requires practice, many trials
“1-trial” learning
“Habits”
Motor Skills
Classical Conditioning
Operant Conditioning
Working
Short-Term
Long-Term
Episodic
Semantic

14. Working Memory in Rodents

15. Radial-Arm Maze (Olton & Samuelson)
How to solve it:
Random choice
Odor Trail
Response Chaining
*Memory

16. Control Procedures Forced Choice Phase Free-Choice Phase 6 1 7 2 5 8 84 3 7
So they are representing information – but how? What is the structure of the knowledge. They can remember the places to go. The places they’ve been. 1 3 4 6 2 5
Rotate and unblock

17. Do rats use prospective encoding or retrospective encoding?

18. Let rat visit N arms WAIT Return rat to maze 1 1 2 2 8 8 3 3 7 7 4 6 4
What is remembered? Retrospective coding versus prospective coding. 4 6 4 6 5 5

19. Results hi Performance after break lo 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
# choices before break

20. A key feature of working memory is rehearsal
A key feature of working memory is rehearsal. Do animals engage in rehearsal?

21. Delayed-Matching-to-Sample

22. Memory Rehearsal? On probe trials give the recognition test here
Directed Forgetting. This is like short-term memory rehearsal. Remember the phone number just long enough to type it into the phone.

23. Do animals have long-term memory?

24. 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.

25. Do animals have episodic memory
Do animals have episodic memory? (Memory of events and their times and places)

26. Western Scrub-Jay in the lab of Nicola Clayton

27. Clayton’s episodic memory task
Worms taste better than peanuts, but worms go bad…

28. Clayton’s Results

29. Summary: What have non-human animals got?
Mental Representations
Procedural memory
Working Memory
Retrospective encoding
Prospective encoding
Long-term memory
Episodic memory
Semantic memory       ?

30. 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.”

31. Numerosity
Basic paradigm: Touching stimuli in numerical order produces a reward.

32. Numerosity (Brannon & Terrace, 1998)

33. Test with novel stimuli

34. 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.