THEORY OF ANIMAL TIMING--MEMORY AND CHOICE

动物时间理论——记忆与选择

• 批准号: 2245230
• 负责人: JOHN GIBBON
• 金额: $ 11.09万
• 依托单位: NEW YORK STATE PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTE DBA RESEARCH FOUNDATION FOR MENTAL HYGIENE, INC
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1986
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1986-04-01 至 1999-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/2245230
• 关键词: association learning; choice; decision making; expectancy; memory; pigeons; preference; psychological reinforcement; stimulus interval; time perception

Previous years on this project have seen the development of a quantitative theory of animal timing, Scalar Expectancy Theory (SET), applied to a wide range of timing effects in animal learning. Past work has analyzed the way in which time delays are remembered and discriminated in a variety of animal psychophysics preparations. The preceding grant period has also studied temporal control in association leaning, and resolved some of the tensions between SBT and alternative stimulus competition theories of associative learning, prototypically the Rescorla-Wagner theory. The major focus of the competing continuation is the study of the role of memory sampling rate in continuous choice situations. Some recent challenges to our previous account of concurrent choice (the matching law, Herrnstein, 1961) are analyzed in depth. Matching is a well-worked phenomenon with a very large literature, but one which only recently has been amenable to differentiating between different molecular mechanisms. The major contribution in the present proposal is the analysis of the free-running rates at which memories are accessed in concurrent choice situations. This results in a system which is formally a Markov chain in space and time. We show that paradoxical preference results are explained by a combination of the rate at which memory is sampled and the probability with which choice for a given alternative is made. Application of these ideas to 2-way and 3-way choice is pursued. One result of this analysis is a characterization of a foraging analogue of choices between prey types and delays to prey, the classical diet choice problem. A later focus in the project is study of concurrent choice when the alternatives are averaged rates of payoff, analogous to patch choice problems in behavioral ecology.

前几年这个项目已经看到了定量的发展 动物计时理论，标量期望理论（SET），广泛应用于 动物学习中的时间效应范围。过去的工作已经分析了方式 其中时间延迟被以各种方式被记住和区分 动物心理物理学制剂。之前的资助期还 研究了关联学习中的时间控制，并解决了一些问题 SBT 与替代刺激竞争理论之间的紧张关系 联想学习，典型的是雷斯科拉-瓦格纳理论。 竞争延续的主要焦点是研究 连续选择情况下的内存采样率。最近的一些 对我们之前关于并发选择的解释的挑战（匹配法则， Herrnstein，1961）进行了深入分析。匹配是一个精心设计的 这种现象有大量文献，但直到最近才出现 能够区分不同的分子机制。 本提案的主要贡献是对 并发选择中访问内存的自由运行速率 情况。这导致了一个正式的马尔可夫链系统 空间和时间。我们证明了矛盾的偏好结果得到了解释 通过内存采样率和 选择给定替代方案的概率。应用 这些想法以2路和3路选择为追求。这样做的结果之一 分析是对觅食类似物之间选择的表征 猎物类型和猎物延迟，经典的饮食选择问题。后来的一个 该项目的重点是研究当替代方案存在时的并发选择 是平均回报率，类似于中的补丁选择问题 行为生态学。