Feature-positive discriminations during a spatial-search task with humans.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Behavioral Neuroscience
• Spatial Cognition

Background:

• Operant discriminations involve conditional cues that signal reinforcement. Landmarks guide spatial search but their conditional control is understudied.
• Understanding how conditional cues and spatial landmarks interact is crucial for explaining complex search behaviors.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how conditional cues influence spatial search behavior guided by landmarks.
• To determine whether spatial information from landmarks or conditional cues is weighted more heavily.

Main Methods:

• College students performed a search task where target location was signaled by a landmark, contingent on a preceding conditional cue.
• Experiments involved feature-positive training and transfer tests to assess conditional control and spatial accuracy.

Main Results:

• Participants demonstrated conditional control, with response magnitude explained by hierarchical models.
• Spatial accuracy indicated a stronger weighting of landmark information over conditional cues, though some spatial interference was observed.
• Reliability, stability, and proximity of landmarks were key factors in spatial learning.

Conclusions:

• Hierarchical accounts effectively explain response magnitude in conditional discrimination tasks.
• Spatial learning models emphasizing landmark salience are better predictors of spatial accuracy in these tasks.
• Conditional cues can modulate spatial search, but landmarks often provide more robust spatial guidance.