How are behavioral sequences learned and integrated? That question will be studied through recently developed techniques for training pigeons to produce and recognize arbitrary sequences of arbitrary stimuli. The animal model of serial learning that this research seeks to establish should have a number of interdisciplinary ramifications: (1) it can provide preparations for studying the neural control of serially organized behavior; (2) models of the reural control of serially organized behavior would benefit programs seeking to define and localize the effects of alcoholism and aging on memory; (3) the non-verbal serial tasks that will be studied could be used with preverbal children in ways that would reveal the contributions that language subsequently makes to the basic cognitive skills that those tasks presuppose. One of the serial tasks on which pigeons will be trained contains a key feature of serial tasks used in verbal learning experiments on human subjects. In the """"""""simultaneous"""""""" chaining paradigm, all of the stimuli and opportunities to respond are available simultaneously. only their configuration is changed from trial to trial. Since nothing in the pigeon's external environment changes as the pigeon performs the sequence, exteroceptive feedback cannot explain the pigeon's ability to peck the required sequence. Nor can proprioceptive feedback: each color appears equally often in each possible position. Another serial learning procedure, a """"""""yes-no"""""""" recognition paradigm, allows one to study a pigeon's ability to discriminate a particular sequence of elements from other orders of the same elements. Because sequences containing more than two elements are used, a binary code for each element (peck vs. don't peck) is not sufficient to produce the correct response. Accordingly, in both situations, the pigeon must generate its own cues to represent its position in the sequence. The nature of representations that mediate sequence production and recognition will be studied by determining (1) a pigeons' ability to """"""""chunk"""""""" subsets of elements, (2) a pigeon's knowledge of the order of non-adjacent elements and of the ordinal position of an element, and (3) the degree of transfer from production to recognition tasks and vice versa. such information will advance our knowledge of serially organized animal behavior. It will also provide an evolutionary perspective for the contribution of verbal mediation to the organization of human serial behavior.
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