University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA.
University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA.
Curr Biol. 2023 Jun 19;33(12):2582-2585.e2. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.05.045. Epub 2023 Jun 9.
Humans can learn tasks explicitly, as they can often describe the rules they have used to learn the task. Animals, however, are thought to learn tasks implicitly (i.e., purely associatively). That is, they gradually learn the correlation or association between the stimulus (or response) and the outcome. Both humans and pigeons can learn matching, where a sample stimulus indicates which one of two stimuli matches the sample. The 1-back reinforcement task is a difficult version of matching in which a correct response on trial N is rewarded only following a response on trial N + 1 (independent of the response on trial N + 1), and the correct response on trial N + 1 indicates whether a reward will occur on trial N + 2, and so forth. Humans do not appear to be able to learn the 1-back rule. Pigeons, however, do show 1-back reinforcement learning, and they appear to do so implicitly by gradually learning the correlation between their response on one trial and the outcome on the next trial (because all other relations are uncorrelated with the outcome). They learn the task slowly and to a level below what would be expected had they learned it explicitly. The present results, together with research with humans, suggest that there are times when human explicit learning may interfere with the ability of humans to learn. Pigeons, however, are not "distracted" by attempts at explicit learning, and thus they are able to learn this and other similar tasks..
人类可以通过明确的方式学习任务，因为他们通常可以描述自己用来学习任务的规则。然而，动物被认为是通过内隐学习（即纯粹的联想学习）来学习任务。也就是说，它们逐渐学习到刺激（或反应）与结果之间的关联或联系。人类和鸽子都可以学习匹配，其中样本刺激表明两个刺激中的哪一个与样本匹配。1 次后强化任务是匹配的一个困难版本，其中只有在试验 N+1 上做出正确反应时，试验 N 上的正确反应才会得到奖励（与试验 N+1 上的反应无关），而试验 N+1 上的正确反应表明试验 N+2 上是否会有奖励，依此类推。人类似乎无法学习 1 次后规则。然而，鸽子确实表现出 1 次后强化学习，它们似乎通过逐渐学习一次试验中的反应与下一次试验中的结果之间的相关性来进行内隐学习（因为所有其他关系都与结果无关）。它们学习任务的速度较慢，达到的水平低于他们通过明确学习所能达到的水平。目前的结果与人类的研究结果表明，有时人类的明确学习可能会干扰人类学习的能力。然而，鸽子不会被明确学习的尝试所“分心”，因此它们能够学习这个任务和其他类似的任务。
