In human learning a distinction has been made between implicit and explicit learning. Implicit learning is thought involve automatic processes of the kind involved in Pavlovian conditioning, while explicit learning is thought to involve conscious hypothesis testing and rule formation, in which the ability to report the rule used to learn the task is taken as evidence. Because non-verbal animals cannot provide such evidence, several indirect methods have been proposed. One of these methods is faster learning by humans of certain explicitly learned tasks than implicitly learned tasks, but pigeons do not show a similar difference. Another method involves the 1-back-reinforcement conditional discrimination (if A choose X, if B choose Y) in which feedback following the conditional response is delayed until the next trial. It has been argued that implicit learning cannot occur over the delay between the conditional response and the reinforcer on the next trial, yet, it has been found that monkeys can learn this 1-back reinforcement task. We have argued that such learning can occur implicitly. We have found that pigeons, a species not thought to learn explicitly, can show significant learning of both 1-back reinforcement matching and 1-back reinforcement mismatching, two versions of the 1-back-reinforcement conditional discrimination. We propose that the evidence for explicit learning by non-verbal animals suffers from alternative simpler accounts because the rationale for explicit learning is based on assumptions that likely are not correct.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2021.104562 | DOI Listing |
Geroscience
July 2024
Department of Neurology, University Medical Center Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
The escalating global burden of age-related neurodegenerative diseases and associated healthcare costs necessitates innovative interventions to stabilize or enhance cognitive functions. Deficits in working memory (WM) are linked to alterations in prefrontal theta-gamma cross-frequency coupling. Low-intensity transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) has emerged as a non-invasive, low-cost approach capable of modulating ongoing oscillations in targeted brain areas through entrainment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurr Biol
June 2023
University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA. Electronic address:
Humans can learn tasks explicitly, as they can often describe the rules they have used to learn the task. Animals, however, are thought to learn tasks implicitly (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLearn Behav
September 2023
Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 40506-0044, USA.
For humans, a distinction has been made between implicit and explicit learning. Implicit learning is thought to involve automatic processes of the kind involved in much Pavlovian conditioning, while explicit learning is thought to involve conscious hypothesis testing and rule formation, in which the subject's statement of the rule has been taken as evidence of explicit learning. Various methods have been used to determine if nonverbal animals are able to learn a task explicitly - among these is the 1-back reinforcement task in which feedback from performance on the current conditional discrimination trial is provided only after completion of the following trial.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBehav Processes
February 2022
University of Kentucky, USA.
In human learning a distinction has been made between implicit and explicit learning. Implicit learning is thought involve automatic processes of the kind involved in Pavlovian conditioning, while explicit learning is thought to involve conscious hypothesis testing and rule formation, in which the ability to report the rule used to learn the task is taken as evidence. Because non-verbal animals cannot provide such evidence, several indirect methods have been proposed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS One
November 2021
Department of Sports Medicine, Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka City, Osaka, Japan.
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