THEORY OF ANIMAL TIMING: LEARNING AND REMEMBERING AGGRE

在过去的几年里，一个关于动物计时的正式理论，标量 期望理论(SET)，已经得到了广泛的发展和应用 动物学习中的时间控制发现。理论和实验，以 Date一直专注于了解预期或预期 在固定的、经过充分学习的延迟时间进行增援。这意味着 该理论的应用主要集中在动物心理物理学上。 准备以及乐器和古典调理的情况 包括标准化的、固定的相互刺激间隔。虽然相当可观 在这里已经发现了成功，这是学习选择的一种常见技巧 基于时间的奖励利用时间表下动物的行为 可变延迟，其中选择方案是随机的，尽管 在平均值上大体恒定。通过实验引入的可变性具有 揭示了学习实验室中的一些重要规律。最多的 其中值得注意的可能是“匹配法则”，根据哪种选择 比例与相应的增强剂比例大致匹配。 基于时间的变量选择中的匹配和推论规则 替代方案，必然是基于对以下集合的某种欣赏 这些延误。这项提议解决了这样一个问题，即这种聚合 在不同的环境中学习、记忆和辨别。在……里面 具体地说，该理论适用于描述恒定概率(泊松 过程)可变间隔奖励时间表，并解决匹配 法律和监管的调查结果。第二个重点是了解 这些聚集体组成时的内存结构 有区别的刺激，而不是延迟加强。研究对象将 在动物心理物理环境中测试它们的能力 从固定的和可变的选择中区分可变集合。这个 心理物理任务需要一种非常不同的反应策略，但它是 基于相同的时间记忆。因此，这项研究应该揭示 记忆的结构属性。

Over the past several years a formal theory of animal timing, Scalar Expectancy Theory (SET), has been developed and applied to a wide range of temporal control findings in animal learning. Theory and experiment to date have been focused on understanding anticipation, or expectancy, of reinforcement at fixed, well learned delays. This has meant that applications of the theory have been mainly focused on animal psychophysics preparations and instrumental and classical conditioning situations involving standardized, fixed interstimulus intervals. While considerable success has been found here, a frequent technique for studying choice behavior of animals under temporally based schedules of reward utillizes variable delays, in which the choice alternatives are stochastic, although generally constant in the mean. Variability introduced experimentally has revealed some important regularities in the learning laboratory. The most notable of these perhaps the "Matching Law", according to which choice proportions approximately match corresponding reinforcer proportions. Matching, and corollary regularities in choice for variable, time-based alternatives, are perforce based on some appreciation of aggregations of these delays. This proposal addresses the problem of how such aggregates are learned, remembered, and discriminated in a variety of settings. In particular, the theory is adapted to describe constant probability (Poisson process) variable interval schedules of reward, and addresses the Matching Law and regulated findings. A second focus is addressed to understanding the memory structure for these aggregates when they constitute discriminative stimuli rather than delays to reinforcement. Subjects will be tested in an animal psychophysics setting for their ability to discriminate variable ensembles from fixed and variable alternatives. The psychophysical task requires a very different response strategy, but it is based on the same memory for time. Hence, the research should reveal structural properties of memories.