Daniel Thomas A, Wright Anthony A, Katz Jeffrey S
Department of Psychology, Auburn University, 226 Thach Hall, Auburn, AL, 36830, USA,
Anim Cogn. 2015 Jul;18(4):831-7. doi: 10.1007/s10071-015-0849-1. Epub 2015 Feb 18.
Many species have demonstrated the capacity to learn abstract concepts. Recent studies have shown that the quantity of stimuli used during training plays a critical role in how subjects learn abstract concepts. As the number of stimuli available in the training set increases, so too does performance on novel combinations. The role of set size has been explored with learning the concept of matching and same/different but not with learning the concept of difference. In the present study, pigeons were trained in a non-matching-to-sample task with an initial training set of three stimuli followed by transfer tests to novel stimuli. The training set was progressively doubled eight times with learning and transfer following each expansion. Transfer performance increased from chance level (50 %) at the smallest set size to a level equivalent to asymptotic training performance at the two largest training set sizes (384, 768). This progressive novel-stimulus transfer function of a non-matching (difference) rule is discussed in comparison with results from a similar experiment where pigeons were trained on a matching rule.
许多物种都已证明具备学习抽象概念的能力。最近的研究表明，训练期间使用的刺激数量在受试者学习抽象概念的方式中起着关键作用。随着训练集中可用刺激数量的增加，对新组合的表现也会提高。集合大小的作用已在学习匹配和相同/不同概念方面进行了探索，但尚未在学习差异概念方面进行探索。在本研究中，鸽子在一项非匹配样本任务中接受训练，初始训练集有三种刺激，随后对新刺激进行转移测试。随着学习和每次扩展后的转移，训练集逐渐翻倍八次。转移表现从最小集合大小时的随机水平（50%）提高到两个最大训练集大小（384、768）时与渐近训练表现相当的水平。与鸽子在匹配规则上接受训练的类似实验结果相比，讨论了非匹配（差异）规则的这种渐进性新刺激转移函数。
