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An Operant Intra-/Extra-dimensional Set-shift Task for Mice

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Published on: January 22, 2016

Same/different discrimination learning with trial-unique stimuli.

Daniel I Brooks¹, Edward A Wasserman

¹Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52240, USA. daniel-brooks@uiowa.edu

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

|June 24, 2008

Summary

Researchers developed novel trial-unique stimuli to study same/different discrimination learning. Pigeons and humans showed similar relational discrimination, suggesting shared cognitive mechanisms.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive psychology
Animal behavior
Comparative cognition

Background:

Same/different discrimination learning research is challenged by stimulus repetition effects.
Individual stimulus memory can confound results in discrimination tasks.

Purpose of the Study:

To develop a novel method for generating trial-unique stimuli to eliminate repetition effects.
To investigate relational discrimination learning in pigeons and humans using these stimuli.

Main Methods:

A new stimulus generation technique created arrays of 16 mosaics (16 cells each) with 16 luminance levels.
Pigeons were trained on a two-alternative forced choice same/different task with trial-unique stimuli.
Human college students underwent the same training and testing procedures.

Main Results:

Pigeons achieved 80% correct performance, indicating successful training with novel stimuli.
Pigeons appeared to discriminate based on spatial configurations rather than low-level perceptual features.
Human participants demonstrated similar discrimination patterns to pigeons.

Conclusions:

The novel trial-unique stimuli effectively mitigate repetition effects in discrimination learning.
Pigeons and humans may employ analogous cognitive mechanisms for relational discrimination.
This study provides insights into the fundamental processes of relational learning across species.