Lindemann-Biolsi Kristy L, Reichmuth Colleen
Long Marine Laboratory, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz, 100 Shaffer Rd., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, USA,
Anim Cogn. 2014 Jul;17(4):879-90. doi: 10.1007/s10071-013-0721-0. Epub 2013 Dec 12.
The ability of an experimentally experienced female California sea lion to form transitive relations across sensory modalities was tested using a matching-to-sample procedure. The subject was trained by trial-and-error, using differential reinforcement, to relate an acoustic sample stimulus to one member from each of two previously established visual classes. Once the two auditory-visual relations were formed, she was tested to determine whether untrained transitive relations would emerge between each of the acoustic stimuli and the remaining stimuli of each 10-member visual class. During testing, the sea lion demonstrated immediate transfer by responding correctly on 89% of the 18 novel transfer trials compared to 88% on familiar baseline trials. We then repeated this training and transfer procedure twice more with new auditory-visual pairings with similar positive results. Finally, the six explicitly trained auditory-visual relations and the 56 derived auditory-visual relations were intermixed in a single session, and the subject's performance remained stable at high levels. This sea lion's transfer performance indicates that a nonhuman animal is capable of forming new associations through cross-modal transitivity.
使用样本匹配程序测试了一只具有实验经验的雌性加州海狮跨感官模态形成传递关系的能力。通过试错法，利用差别强化对受试动物进行训练，使其将声学样本刺激与先前建立的两个视觉类别中的每一个类别中的一个成员联系起来。一旦形成了两种听觉 - 视觉关系，就对其进行测试，以确定在每个声学刺激与每个包含10个成员的视觉类别的其余刺激之间是否会出现未经训练的传递关系。在测试过程中，与熟悉的基线试验中88%的正确率相比，这只海狮在18次新的转移试验中有89%的正确率，表现出即时转移。然后，我们用新的听觉 - 视觉配对又重复了两次这个训练和转移程序，结果相似。最后，在一个环节中将六个明确训练的听觉 - 视觉关系和56个派生的听觉 - 视觉关系混合在一起，受试动物的表现仍保持在高水平且稳定。这只海狮的转移表现表明，非人类动物能够通过跨模态传递性形成新的关联。
