How are behavioral sequences learned and integrated? That question will be studied through recently developed techniques for training pigeons and monkeys to produce arbitrary sequences (lists) of arbitrary stimuli. In the """"""""simultaneous"""""""" chaining paradigm, all of the stimuli and opportunities to respond are available simultaneously, a key feature of serial tasks used in verbal learning experiments on human subjects. Only their configuration is changed from trial to trial. Since nothing in the subject's external environment changes as it performs the sequence, exteroceptive feedback cannot explain its ability to produce the required sequence. Nor can proprioceptive feedback: each item appears equally often in each possible position. The lists that will be trained will consist, in most instances, of digitized color photographs that are presented on a touch-sensitive video monitor. The nature of representations that mediate sequence production will be studied by determining (1) how list learning changes with successive lists, (2) a monkey's and a pigeon's ability to """"""""chunk"""""""" the sequences it learns, (3) subjects' knowledge of the ordinal position of items in a list, (4) how shifts in the configuration of the list items during the execution of the list affect performance, (5) how learning lists of a particular length affect learning of longer or shorter lists, and (6) the nature of the subject's episodic memory and what the animal perceives in photographs. 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, and an animal model of serial learning that should have a number of interdisciplinary ramifications; (1) it can provide preparations for studying the neural control of serially organized behavior, (2) the non-verbal serial tasks that will be studied could be used with proverbial children in ways that would reveal the contributions that language subsequently makes to the basic cognitive skills that those tasks presuppose.
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