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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Memory For Stimulus Sequences: A Divide Between Humans And Other Animals?, Ghirlanda Stefano, Johan Lind, Magnus Enquist
Memory For Stimulus Sequences: A Divide Between Humans And Other Animals?, Ghirlanda Stefano, Johan Lind, Magnus Enquist
Publications and Research
Humans stand out among animals for their unique capacities in domains such as language, culture and imitation, yet it has been difficult to identify cognitive elements that are specifically human. Most research has focused on how information is processed after it is acquired, e.g. in problem solving or ‘insight’ tasks, but we may also look for species differences in the initial acquisition and coding of information. Here, we show that non-human species have only a limited capacity to discriminate ordered sequences of stimuli. Collating data from 108 experiments on stimulus sequence discrimination (1540 data points from 14 bird and mammal …
The Power Of Associative Learning And The Ontogeny Of Optimal Behaviour, Magnus Enquist, Johan Lind, Stefano Ghirlanda
The Power Of Associative Learning And The Ontogeny Of Optimal Behaviour, Magnus Enquist, Johan Lind, Stefano Ghirlanda
Publications and Research
Behaving efficiently (optimally or near-optimally) is central to animals’ adaptation to their environment. Much evolutionary biology assumes, implicitly or explicitly, that optimal behavioural strategies are genetically inherited, yet the behaviour of many animals depends crucially on learning. The question of how learning contributes to optimal behaviour is largely open. Here we propose an associative learning model that can learn optimal behaviour in a wide variety of ecologically relevant circumstances. The model learns through chaining, a term introduced by Skinner to indicate learning of behaviour sequences by linking together shorter sequences or single behaviours. Our model formalizes the concept of conditioned …