THEORY OF ANIMAL TIMING: MEMORY AND ASSOCIATION

在过去的几年里，这个项目已经看到了正式的发展 动物计时理论，标量期望理论(SET)，应用于 动物学习中广泛的计时效应。过去的工作分析了 中记忆和区分计时延迟的方式 多种动物心理物理制剂。最近的授权期 研究了增援的可变延迟集合体的内存 与固定延迟的内存形成对比。最近出版的出版物(附录A) 总结了关于这个问题的许多理论和实证工作。 在那里显示了文献中的各种常见发现 选择(过匹配、欠匹配、匹配和变量偏好 延迟)可以包含在SET、A大调的一般规则中 查找一直是对记忆进行编码和解码的“一次抽样”规则 用于可变延迟。帐户对比度首选项的测试 泊松变异性，在实验室(和自然界)中很常见，具有 可变延迟的唯一新分布(向后指数)， 这种偏好没有表现出迄今常见的不对称性。一个 计划继续这项工作，审查这些组 使用时间泛化过程的存储器中的延迟。 开发的技术允许逐个试验地分析 记忆和反应方差的相对贡献。 竞相延续的第二个焦点是研究 学习联想获得过程中的时间因素。早期工作 关于这个项目，设想收购一个协会作为 感知到更好的、即更短的增援延迟 条件刺激，相对于情境中的其他线索。这个 目前的提案将解决SET和SET之间早先形成的紧张关系 联想学习的另类、刺激性竞争理论 典型的是Rescoria-Wagner理论。竞争理论 联想学习最初并不是为解决时间问题而设计的 预测性问题，而是了解一些标志 学习过程的性质、阻塞和遮蔽。设置，在 相反，被设计为理解时间处理，但并没有 认真解决了遮挡和遮挡现象。一些人 在非或有议定书与或有议定书领域的有力设计 (如Durlach，1983)倾向于对语境阻断的学习解释。 本提案的初步工作对这一解释提出了质疑。 拟议的研究将试图推动对比在一个时间- 基于比较器理论和基于竞争的增量理论 出现了多重关联。

Previous years on this project have seen the development of a formal 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 timed delays are remembered and discriminated in a variety of animal psychophysics preparations. The recent grant period has studied memory for aggregates of variable delays to reinforcement in contrast to memory for fixed delays. A recent publication (Appendix A) summarizes much of the theoretical and empirical work on this problem. It is shown there that a variety of common findings in the literature on choice (overmatching, undermatching, matching and preference for variable delay) may be subsumed within the general rubric of SET., A major finding has been the "one-sample" rule for encoding and decoding memory for variable delays. Tests of the account contrast preference for Poisson variability, common n the laboratory (and in nature), with a unique new distribution of variable delays (Backward exponential), for which preference does not exhibit the asymmetry heretofore common. A continuation of this line of work is planned examining these sets of delays in memory utilizing a temporal generalization procedure. Techniques are developed which permit a trial-by-trial analysis of the relative contribution of memory and response variance. A second focus of the competing continuation would study the role of temporal factors in the acquisition of learned associations. Early work on this project conceived of the acquisition of an association as the perception of a better, i.e. shorter, delay to reinforcement cued by the conditioned stimulus, relative to other cues in the situation. The present proposal will address a tension developed earlier between SET and alternative, stimulus competition theories of associative learning -- prototypically, the Rescoria-Wagner theory. Competition theories of associative learning were not originally designed to address temporal predictiveness problems, but rather to understand some hallmark properties of the learning process, blocking and overshadowing. SET, in contrast, was designed to understand temporal processing, and has not seriously addressed the blocking and overshadowing phenomena. Some strong designs in the area of non-contingent versus contingent protocols (e.g. Durlach, 1983) have favored a learning account of context blocking. Preliminary work for the present proposal challenges this interpretation. The proposed studies will attempt to push the contrast between a time- based comparator theory and a competition based incremental theory of the emergence of multiple associations.