Serial pattern learning by rats: Transfer of a formally defined stimulus relationship and the significance of nonreinforcement

Hulse, Stewart H.; Dorsky, Noah P.

doi:10.3758/bf03209273

Cited by 152 publications

(84 citation statements)

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“…Bregman et al, 2012;Gentner and Hulse, 1998;Hulse and Dorsky, 1979;Scharff et al, 1998) and human learning studies (e.g. Anderson, 1976;Gathercole and Baddeley, 1990;Reber, 1967).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gradient language dominance affects talker learning

Bregman

Creel

2014

Cognition

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“…Bregman et al, 2012;Gentner and Hulse, 1998;Hulse and Dorsky, 1979;Scharff et al, 1998) and human learning studies (e.g. Anderson, 1976;Gathercole and Baddeley, 1990;Reber, 1967).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gradient language dominance affects talker learning

Bregman

Creel

2014

Cognition

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“…In one study (Hulse & Dorsky, 1979), rats demonstrated the ability to generalize a rule from one set of patterns to a different pattern. In a second study, Fountain and Hulse (1981) evaluated rats' ability to extrapolate patterns of varied structural complexity.…”

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confidence: 99%

Pattern Structure and Rule Induction in Sequential Learning

Fountain¹

2008

CCBR

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When presented with structured sequences to learn, do nonhuman animals abstract and learn relational information-do they induce and learn rules? This paper provides an overview of the current evidence that bears on this question from our recent behavioral and psychobiological research on rat sequential learning. Evidence is presented that rats are sensitive to hierarchical structure in response sequences, that phrasing can bias rats' perception of pattern structure, that rats induce pattern structures from nonadjacent items in "interleaved" patterns, and that rule learning processes are active concurrently with other learning processes. The paper also describes work on the psychobiology of sequential learning that shows that multiple concurrent cognitive processes can be dissociated by MK-801, an NMDA receptor antagonist, and by other drug and lesion manipulations. Taken together, the results indicate that rats use rule learning processes concurrently with associative learning processes in a wide variety of sequential learning problems.Keywords: sequential learning, rule learning, hierarchical organization, phrasing, interleaved patterns Sequential learning involves learning to organize sequences of behavior or to anticipate events that occur in a consistent sequential order. Despite a century of research directed toward characterizing how acquired sequential behavior is organized, many questions remain unanswered regarding the nature of the mechanisms responsible for sequential learning in animal behavior. Perhaps the question that has proven most difficult to answer has been whether or not relational structures that are present in a sequence to be learned influence how and what animals learn. That is to say, when presented with structured sequences, do nonhuman animals encode a memorial representation of their experience that "goes beyond the information given" (Bruner, 1957)? Do they ultimately abstract and learn relational information-do they induce and learn rules? In this paper, I hope to provide an overview of the current evidence that bears on this question from our recent behavioral and psychobiological research on rat sequential learning. First, I will describe some behavioral studies from the 1970s and 1980s that seemed to show that rats indeed learn rules from patterns composed of sequences of food quantities, and then I will describe our recent research with a computational model that questioned the necessity of that conclusion. Next I will describe more recent operant research from our laboratory consistent with the idea that rats are sensitive to the structure of patterns that are hierarchically organized or composed of two interleaved subpatterns. Finally, I will present data from drug and lesion studies that suggest that sequential learning in rats is mediated by multiple concurrent psychological and brain systems, at least one of which appears to be related to rule induction. Rule Induction in Reward MagnitudeSerial Pattern LearningIn the 1970s and 1980s, several studies by Stewart Hulse and co...

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“…Fountain, 1990;Fountain & Hulse, 1981;Fountain & Rowan, 1995a, 1995bHulse & Dorsky, 1979;Restle & Brown, 1970;Restle & Burnside , 1972). Specifically, mice in both experiments produced high rates of overextension errors at chunk boundaries, for example, producing "4" responses after a "123" chunk.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, rats have been trained to anticipate the elements of patterned sequences of reward events and patterned series of locations in spatial arrays. Under these conditions, rats appear to learn "rules" describing the structure of sequences and "chunk" sequences into meaningful subsequences to reduce memory load (Fountain, 1990;Fountain & Annau, 1984;Fountain, Henne, & Hulse, 1984;Hulse, 1978;Hulse & Dorsky, 1977, 1979Page, Hulse, & Cynx, 1989;Terrace, 1987Terrace, , 1991Terrace & Chen, 1991a, 1991. There is also evidence for functionally similar rulelearning and chunking processes in avians and primates (Page et aL , 1989;Terrace, 1987Terrace, , 1991Terrace & Chen, 1991a, 1991b.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…In particular, rats can learn rules to encode patterns ranging from very simple to those having three or more levels of hierarchical structure (Fountain , 1990;Fountain, Evensen, & Hulse, 1983;Fountain & Rowan , 1995a, 1995bHulse, 1978;Hulse & Dorsky, 1977, 1979. They can also extrapolate known patterns to predict new items, and they can generalize structures from pattern to pattern to facilitate learning (Fountain & Hulse, 1981;Hulse & Dorsky, 1979). Another sign that rats are sensitive to pattern structure is the fact that they have great difficulty learning to respond appropriately to a pattern element or chunk that is an "exception-to-the-rule" (Fountain & Rowan, 1995a, 1995b.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Serial-Pattern Learning in Mice: Pattern Structure and Phrasing

1999

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In two experiments, mice learned 24-element serial patterns. In Experiment 1, patterns either were perfectly structured or had a single violation element and were either phrased by temporal pauses or unphrased. In Experiment 2, the same violation pattern of Experiment 1 was phrased by temporal cues, visual cues, or a combination of the two. For mice, as for rats and humans in earlier studies, pattern structure predicted pattern learning difficulty and also the nature and relative frequency of errors. Mice, like rats and humans , also found a violation element especially difficult to learn and at that point in the pattern made errors consistent with the structure of the remainder of the pattern . However, in both experiments, phrasing interfered with responding correctly on the element after the phrasing cue. In a third experiment, mice were able to use temporal intervals and, to a lesser degree, visual stimuli as discriminative cues to control spatial responses in the same apparatus used in earlier studies. The results support the view that mice are sensitive to pattern organization but may have difficulty using phrasing cues in the context of serial patterns.One of the fundamental questions in psychology is how animals organize behavior through time (Lashley, 1951), and thus a significant amount of comparative cognition research has focused on determining how animals learn about sequences of events and organize their responses to them. Sequential learning processes in species as different as humans, rhesus monkeys, rats, and pigeons appear to have a number of common features. For example, when animals must learn

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Serial pattern learning by rats: Transfer of a formally defined stimulus relationship and the significance of nonreinforcement

Cited by 152 publications

References 10 publications

Gradient language dominance affects talker learning

Gradient language dominance affects talker learning

Pattern Structure and Rule Induction in Sequential Learning

Serial-Pattern Learning in Mice: Pattern Structure and Phrasing

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