Concurrent learning of multiple oddity discrimination in rats

High-Speed Videography Reveals How Honeybees Can Turn a Spatial Concept Learning Task Into a Simple Discrimination Task by Stereotyped Flight Movements and Sequential Inspection of Pattern Elements

“…Yet, in the last 50 years, concept learning has been a recurrent theme when exploring animal cognition (Savage-Rumbaugh et al, 1980 ; Savage-Rumbaugh, 1984 ; Akhtar and Tomasello, 1997 ; Zayan and Vauclair, 1998 ; Depy et al, 1999 ; Penn et al, 2008 ; Shettleworth, 2010 ). Scientists have discovered concept learning in various animal taxa, for example the learning of sameness and difference concepts in the pigeon (Zentall and Hogan, 1974 ), in ducklings (Martinho and Kacelnik, 2016 ), monkeys (Wright et al, 1984 ), the honeybee (Giurfa et al, 2001 ), and one study comparing two species of monkeys and pigeons (Wright and Katz, 2006 ); other studies focused on oddity and non-oddity in monkeys (Moon and Harlow, 1955 ), pigeons (Lombardi et al, 1984 ; Lombardi, 2008 ), rats (Taniuchi et al, 2017 ), sea lions (Hille et al, 2006 ), dogs (Gadzichowski et al, 2016 ), and honeybees (Muszynski and Couvillon, 2015 ); the concept of symmetry/asymmetry in honeybees (Giurfa et al, 1996 ). Spatial concepts such as aboveness and belowness have been explored in a number of vertebrates (Zentall and Hogan, 1974 ; Depy et al, 1999 ; Spinozzi et al, 2004 ), and also the honeybee (Avarguès-Weber et al, 2011 , 2012 ).…”

Oddity Learning in the Rat

“…Past oddity studies (e.g., Koronakos and Arnold 1957;Thomas and Noble 1988;Wodinsky and Bitterman 1953) could not show evidence of oddity learning in rats due to the use of one-odd tasks or two-odd tasks or serial presentation of multiple oddity tasks. Conversely, recent oddity studies (e.g., April et al 2011;Lazarowski et al 2019;Taniuchi et al 2017) were able to show evidence of oddity concept learning in rats by employing multiple concurrent oddity tasks. In this entry, the focus is on the improvement in rats' oddity performances from the original oddity studies (e.g., Koronakos and Arnold 1957;Thomas and Noble 1988;Wodinsky and Bitterman 1953) until today, and some critical parameters (e.g., concurrent presentation, the use of a large number of stimuli) that enabled various species (e.g., rats, monkeys, and pigeons) to demonstrate oddity concept learning.…”

“…Single-feature learning (learning based on the specific features of a single item) might be responsible for forming such learning set. It also became evident at the initial stage of training with one-odd tasks (AAAAAB) in Taniuchi et al (2017). This task can be solved by learning to respond to a specific item (e.g., item B in the case of AAAAAB), because one-odd task provides an opportunity to a specific item to be an odd item at every trial until the learning criteria is met.…”

“…Animal subjects are required to identify and retain logical relations among stimuli and to apply this relational understanding to sets of novel stimuli. This relationship does not exist in the physical environment and as concrete entities (Taniuchi et al 2017). Therefore, to encode the abstract aspects of the discriminative stimuli, higherorder cognition is required.…”

“…Compared to monkeys and pigeons, the path of the attainment of oddity concept learning in rats was not so smooth. However, with the continuous efforts of researchers, robust evidence of an oddity concept has been found in rats (e.g., Lazarowski et al 2019;Taniuchi et al 2017). Hence, a question arises as to how rats acquired the oddity concept.…”