Difficult serial anticipation learning in rats: Rule-encoding vs. memory |
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| Authors: | E J Capaldi Timothy M Nawrocki Donna R Verry |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, 47907, West Lafayette, Indiana
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| Abstract: | Rats, trained in a runway, were asked to anticipate, while running slowly, the last two events in repeating series of .045-g food pellets. The series were either weakly monotonic (14, 5, 5, 1, and then 0 pellets/run) or nonmonotonic (5-5-14-1-0). While the terminal 0-pellet event was better anticipated in the weakly monotonic series, the reverse was the case for the next-to-last 1-pellet event. These findings were expected from a memory-discrimination learning hypothesis of serial learning, which suggests that the memory of one event in a series can be used to signal the next event. However, the better anticipation of the 1-pellet event by the nonmonotonic group was inconsistent with the recently stated rule-encoding position of Hulse (1980). According to that view, difficult series of the sort employed in the present investigation are learned by encoding the rule structure of the series, with events in the series with the simple rule structure (the weakly monotonic series in this investigation) being better anticipated than events in the series with the complex rule structure. |
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