Beyond the information (not) given: Representations of stimulus absence in rats (Rattus norvegicus)

Questions regarding the nature of nonhuman cognition continue to be of great interest within cognitive science and biology. However, progress in characterizing the relative contribution of "simple" associative and more "complex" reasoning mechanisms has been painfully slow-something that the tendency for researchers from different intellectual traditions to work separately has only exacerbated. This article reexamines evidence that rats respond differently to the nonpresentation of an event than they do if the physical location of that event is covered. One class of explanation for the sensitivity to different types of event absence is that rats' representations go beyond their immediate sensory experience and that covering creates uncertainty regarding the status of an event (thus impacting on the underlying causal model of the relationship between events). A second class of explanation, which includes associative mechanisms, assumes that rats represent only their direct sensory experience and that particular features of the covering procedures provide incidental cues that elicit the observed behaviors. We outline a set of consensus predictions from these two classes of explanation focusing on the potential importance of uncertainty about the presentation of an outcome. The example of covering the food-magazine during the extinction of appetitive conditioning is used as a test case for the derivation of diagnostic tests that are not biased by preconceived assumptions about the nature of animal cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record