Journal article
Resolving the associative learning paradox by category learning in pigeons
Current biology, Vol.33(6), pp.1112-1116.e2
03/2023
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.01.024
PMCID: PMC10050111
PMID: 36754051
Abstract
A wealth of evidence indicates that humans can engage two types of mechanisms to solve category-learning tasks: declarative mechanisms, which involve forming and testing verbalizable decision rules, and associative mechanisms, which involve gradually linking stimuli to appropriate behavioral responses.
In contrast to declarative mechanisms, associative mechanisms have received surprisingly little attention in the broader category-learning literature. Although various forms of associatively driven artificial intelligence (AI) have matched-and even surpassed-humans' performance on several challenging problems,
associative learning is routinely dismissed as being too simple to power the impressive cognitive achievements of both humans and non-human species.
Here, we attempt to resolve this paradox by demonstrating that pigeons-which appear to rely solely on associative learning mechanisms in several tasks that promote declarative rule use by humans
-succeed at learning a novel, highly demanding category structure that ought to hinder declarative rule use: the sectioned-rings task. Our findings highlight the power and flexibility that associative mechanisms afford in the realm of category learning.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Resolving the associative learning paradox by category learning in pigeons
- Creators
- Edward A Wasserman - Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, The University of Iowa, 340 Iowa Ave, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA. Electronic address: ed-wasserman@uiowa.eduAndrew G Kain - Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, The University of Iowa, 340 Iowa Ave, Iowa City, IA 52242, USAEllen M O'Donoghue - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Current biology, Vol.33(6), pp.1112-1116.e2
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.cub.2023.01.024
- PMID
- 36754051
- PMCID
- PMC10050111
- ISSN
- 0960-9822
- eISSN
- 1879-0445
- Grant note
- DOI: 10.13039/100000002, name: National Institutes of Health, award: P01HD080679
- Language
- English
- Electronic publication date
- 02/02/2023
- Date published
- 03/2023
- Academic Unit
- Psychological and Brain Sciences; Iowa Neuroscience Institute
- Record Identifier
- 9984366049302771
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