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Pigeons' adaptive and flexible performance provides strong empirical support for the involvement of focusing and shifting attention under exceptionally challenging training conditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Short assessments of spatial working memory (SWM) in dogs are becoming popular evaluations of canine aging and individual differences. In a typical SWM task, an experimenter hides a reward inside of a bucket at a specific stimulus position while the dog watches. Then, following a varying delay interval, the dog is released to choose a bucket. The longest delay at which the dog can successfully choose the bucket containing the reward is considered to reflect the dog's SWM duration. Although past studies were informative, the tasks often lacked a valid measure of SWM due to dogs' ability to use nonmnemonic strategies, such as body orientation or sustained attention, to successfully solve these tasks without relying on working memory mechanisms. Therefore, we designed the first study to assess the internal validity of these tasks by directly comparing dogs' performance on two experimental conditions. We found that dogs performed worse in a control condition in which nonmnemonic strategies were eliminated compared with a typical SWM task condition. In addition, our results indicate a strong relationship between the percentage of delay time that a dog spends orienting its head or body to the correct bucket and performance in a typical SWM task. These findings were the first to show a difference in SWM performance when dogs' use of nonmnemonic strategies was controlled and stress the importance of considering the internal validity of these tasks if used to examine SWM in future work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Episodic-like memory (ELM) involves remembering the what, where, and when (WWW) of an event as a whole, and it can be studied behaviorally. In research regarding this type of memory with children, one experiment proposes a new task adapted from animal foraging studies. A task derived from a foraging model was presented its considers the characteristics required for ELM study in children and employs a single trial presented from an egocentric perspective to avoid memory consolidation. One study compared four-year-old children's choices after being trained with one or three trials using a hide-and-seek task. The consequence size and retention interval between training and test were manipulated. Results showed that children chose the optimal outcome after an immediate or delayed test. The children's choices were conditional on the size of the consequences and the time at retrieval according to the Temporal Weighting Rule (Devenport & Devenport, 1994). The results were similar to those of animal studies and were consistent with a foraging memory model. In discussion, the advantages and limitations of the proposed task for the study of ELM in children are described and explained. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).A fundamental question in comparative cognition concerns the ability to remember back in time to an earlier event or episode. This ability is referred to as episodic memory. Whether nonhumans can be used to model human episodic memory has engendered much interest and debate for over 2 decades. The central hypothesis of an animal model of episodic memory is that, at the moment of the memory assessment, the animal remembers back in time to a specific earlier event or episode. I describe (a) an approach for evaluating evidence of episodic memory in animal models (b) what aspects of episodic memory are being modeled in animals (c) what standards ought to be applied to a candidate model of episodic memory in nonhumans (d) the first evidence of episodic memory in nonhumans, and (e) a brief overview of the diversity of approaches that are now available. The remainder of the article focuses on the development of a robust model of episodic memory in rats. Converging lines of evidence suggest that rats provide a good model for exploring episodic memory. This evidence includes studies that focus on (a) what-where-when memory (b) source memory (c) binding of episodic memories (d) memory of multiple Items in context using episodic memory (e) replay of episodic memories (f), recollection, and (g) answering an unexpected question after incidental encoding. In each of these domains, I describe evidence for episodic memory in the absence of nonepisodic judgments of familiarity. I end with some consideration of future directions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).It has been suggested that schedule-induced behaviors allow organisms to adapt better to temporal regularities of the environment. The main goal of the present study was to observe the effect of schedule-induced drinking (SID) on the performance in fixed-interval (FI) schedules. Rats were exposed to a FI 15-, 30-, or 60-s food reinforcement schedule, and only half of them had access to water in the experimental chamber. Rats with access to water developed SID, which occurred in the first part of the interval, regardless of the FI value, and was followed by an increase in lever pressing rate. There were no substantial differences in the quantitative measures of timing between groups that had or did not have access to water, except for the rats in the FI 15-s group with access to water, who showed longer postreinforcement pauses, possibly attributable to competition between SID and lever pressing. SID did not manifest the scalar property, contrary to lever pressing, but it is proposed that behaviors are displayed serially until the last behavior before the target operant response becomes a discriminative stimulus for that behavior. It is not assumed that the purpose of schedule-induced behaviors is to aid timing, but the development of behavioral patterns might determine the performance of organisms on temporal tasks. Additionally, in some cases competition between responses might exert more control on when the operant behavior occurs than timing. Timing seems to consist in the temporal organization of available behaviors that leads to a specific behavior occurring at a specified time, a single characteristic that typically had come to indicate accurate timing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Nonhuman animal models show that reinforcers control behavior through what they signal about the likelihood of future events, but such control is generally imperfect. Imperfect control by the relation between past and likely future events may result from imperfect detection of those events as they occur, which result in imperfect detection of the relation between events. Such an approach would suggest the involvement of more complex psychological processes like memory in simple operant learning. We extended a research paradigm previously examined with nonhuman animals to test the ability of a quantitative model that assumes imperfect control by the relation between events arises because of (a) occasional misallocation of reinforcers to the wrong response, causing imperfect control by the relation between events; and (b) a tendency to explore or exploit which is independent of the relation between events. Children played a game in which one of two different responses could produce a reinforcer. The likelihood of a reinforcer for the same response that produced the last one varied across three conditions (.1, .5, .9). As with nonhuman animal models, children's choices followed these probabilities closely but not perfectly, suggesting strong control by what one reinforcer signals about subsequent reinforcers. Choice was well described by the quantitative model. This same model also provides a good description of nonhuman animal-model data, suggesting fundamentally similar mechanisms of control across species. These findings suggest reinforcers control behavior to the extent the relation between reinforcers can be detected-that is, simple operant learning may be more complex than is typically assumed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Perceptual decision making involves choices between alternatives based on sensory information. Studies in primates and rodents revealed a stochastic perceptual evidence accumulation process that, after reaching threshold, results in action execution. Birds represent a cognitively highly successful vertebrate class that has been evolving independent from mammals for more than 300 million years. The present study investigated whether perceptual decision making in pigeons shows behavioral and computational dynamics comparable to those in mammals and rodents. Using a novel "pigeon helmet" with liquid shutter displays that controls visual input to individual eyes/hemispheres with precise timing, we indeed revealed highly similar dynamics of perceptual decision making. Thus, both mammals and birds seem to share this core cognitive process that possibly represents a fundamental constituent of decision making throughout vertebrates. Interestingly, in our experiments we additionally discovered that both avian hemispheres start independent sensory accumulation processes without any major interhemispheric exchange. Because birds lack a corpus callosum and have only a small anterior commissure, they seem to be forced to decide on motor responses based on unihemispheric decisions under conditions of time pressure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).An innovative adaptive discrimination procedure examined how two bird species, pigeons and starlings, recognize and discriminate two-dimensional (2D) visual shapes. Prior results suggest a comparative divergence between mammals and birds in their relative reliance on vertices versus line segments to mediate discrimination. To address this potentially important difference, four pigeons and five starlings were tested with a square versus triangle discrimination in two experiments. An adaptive genetic algorithm guided the selection and organization of the training and test stimuli. Both species showed considerable flexibility in accurately selecting triangles despite wide variation in stimulus appearance and location. Most critically, Experiment 2 revealed that both bird species relied more on the figures' vertices during successful discrimination than their connecting line segments. This reliance was revealed by both traditional accuracy differences using contour-deleted displays and genetic algorithm-based shifts in "gene values" caused by the birds' selection. These results, in contrast to previous findings, indicate that mammals and birds likely converge in their reliance on vertices as a highly critical feature in visual shape discrimination. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).We have previously demonstrated that chimpanzees, similar to humans, can discriminate the orientations of a diagonal line better when lines are presented in redundant contexts than alone. In the present study, we examined whether the same redundant context facilitated diagonal-orientation discrimination in mice. Mice were presented one of three simultaneous, diagonal-orientation discrimination tasks (a) presented alone, (b) presented with the context that resulted in emergent configurations in chimpanzees and humans, and (c) presented with the context not resulting in emergent configurations in chimpanzees or humans. MEK inhibitor cancer In contrast to the facilitative effect of congruent context in chimpanzees and humans, the identical context did not facilitate the discrimination of the diagonal orientation in mice. This finding suggests that mice, unlike chimpanzees and humans, do not perceive emergent Gestalt. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).