Pattern Cue and Visual Cue Competition in a Foraging Task by Rats

Abstract

In 4 experiments, rats searched for food located on top of 4 of 16 towers which were arranged in a 4 × 4 matrix. The location of the baited towers was cued by visual landmark cues (the baited towers were striped, the others white) and by pattern cues (the baited towers were located in a 2 × 2 pattern within the larger 4 × 4 matrix) or simply by pattern cues without visual landmark cues. In 3 of the experiments, visual cues, after being paired with pattern cues, were removed altogether (Experiment 1), put into competition with pattern cues (Experiment 2), or made noninformative (Experiment 3). In Experiment 4, it was the pattern cues that were made noninformative. Collectively, the data suggest strongly that whereas the pattern is learned, even when presumably more salient visual cues are present, the connection between pattern and food location is much weaker than that between visual cue and food location. These data are more easily explained by a model of learning that includes dedicated modules than by a single-system associative model.

Non-numerical strategies used by bees to solve numerical cognition tasks

“…It will also not suffice to test for continuous cues separately because animals may learn multiple redundant cues and use those available when others are not [74][75][76][77][78][79]. Testing all continuous variables (that cannot be kept constant across stimuli for the entirety of training) and numerosity within one test can help determine if continuous variables have been learned.…”

Navigation: Whence Our Sense of Direction?

“…Shape-parameter theories [14] share with mapped-landmark theories the assumption that the map encodes nongeometric features of the environment, as well as its geometry. Like mappedlandmark theories, they assume that the animal uses those features as both signs and beacons under ordinary navigational circumstances, when it is oriented (compare [15]). When, however, the animal is disoriented, the re-alignment of its current perception of environmental shape with the remembered environmental shape is mediated by a computation that relies on parameters computationally abstracted from global shape, such as principal axes or medial axes.…”