Pearce John M
Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3AT, UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2009 Sep;62(9):1665-84. doi: 10.1080/17470210902805589. Epub 2009 Apr 30.
The ability of animals to find important goals in their environment has been said to require a form of learning that is qualitatively different from that normally studied in the conditioning laboratory. Such spatial learning has been said to depend upon the construction of a global representation of the environment, and the acquisition of knowledge about the position of goals with reference to this representation is said to be unaffected by the presence of other cues or landmarks. To evaluate the first of these claims, experiments are described that investigated the extent to which the effects of training in one environment transfer to another. To evaluate the second claim, experiments are described that investigated whether cue competition effects normally found in conditioning studies can be found in spatial tasks. Overall, the results indicate that most of the phenomena of spatial learning can be explained by the principles of associative learning. The implications of the reported results for an understanding of the neural mechanisms of spatial learning are considered.
动物在其环境中找到重要目标的能力被认为需要一种学习形式，这种学习形式在性质上不同于通常在条件反射实验室中所研究的学习形式。据说这种空间学习依赖于对环境的全局表征的构建，并且关于目标位置的知识的获取相对于这种表征而言，被认为不受其他线索或地标存在的影响。为了评估这些说法中的第一个，文中描述了一些实验，这些实验研究了在一种环境中训练的效果转移到另一种环境的程度。为了评估第二个说法，文中描述了一些实验，这些实验研究了在条件反射研究中通常发现的线索竞争效应是否能在空间任务中被发现。总体而言，结果表明空间学习的大多数现象可以用联想学习的原理来解释。文中还考虑了所报告的结果对于理解空间学习的神经机制的意义。
