Smirnova A A, Bagotskaia M S, Zorina Z A
Department of Higher Nervous Activity, Lomonosov State University, Moscow.
Zh Vyssh Nerv Deiat Im I P Pavlova. 2003 May-Jun;53(3):321-8.
It was shown that a large set of training stimuli promotes abstract concept learning. These experiments were designed to assess whether an application of a large set of training stimuli would facilitate matching learning in crows. Four hooded crows were trained with a set of 72 unique combinations of stimuli in two-alternative simultaneous matching tasks with stimuli of three different categories: achromatic color (white, light-grey, dark-grey, and black), shape (Arabic numerals from 1 to 4 used as visual shapes only), and number of elements (heterogeneous graphic arrays from 1 to 4 items). Although the performance of all crows was significantly above chance (p < 0.01) in some 72-trial blocks, birds were unable to establish matching and to reach the criterion of learning 80% correct or better over 72 consecutive trials) in 5184 trials. Thus, the modified training procedure was less efficient than the training technique previously used (successive cyclic repetition of three small sets of training stimuli), which allowed four of six crows to acquire the matching rule after 1780, 2360, 3830, and 5260 trials [4,9].
结果表明，大量的训练刺激有助于抽象概念学习。这些实验旨在评估应用大量训练刺激是否会促进乌鸦的匹配学习。四只带帽乌鸦在两项同时进行的二选一匹配任务中，接受了由72种独特刺激组合构成的一组训练，这些刺激分为三个不同类别：无彩色（白色、浅灰色、深灰色和黑色）、形状（仅用作视觉形状的1到4的阿拉伯数字）和元素数量（1到4个项目的异构图形阵列）。尽管在某些72次试验的组块中，所有乌鸦的表现均显著高于随机水平（p < 0.01），但在5184次试验中，这些鸟未能建立匹配关系，也未达到在连续72次试验中正确率达到80%或更高的学习标准。因此，改进后的训练程序不如先前使用的训练技术（三组小训练刺激的连续循环重复）有效，先前的技术使六只乌鸦中的四只在1780、2360、3830和5260次试验后掌握了匹配规则[4,9]。
