Abstract
Eight rhesus monkeys were trained on a counterbalanced series of concurrent, two-choice, discrimination tasks that provided different numbers of correct or incorrect objects as lists of discriminanda. Small, large, or infinite lengths of correct or incorrect object lists were combined in different tasks, and acquisition performances were compared. When tasks had an infinite number of objects in their correct list and a small number (4) in their incorrect list, acquisition entailed significantly less error than was seen when a small number of correct objects was paired with an infinite incorrect list. This pattern of outcomes seemed attributable to novelty preference. However, comparison of error distributions from tasks with infinite. list lengths to distributions from analogous tasks with fixed list lengths provided some basis for interpreting the way monkeys integrated information that emerged from the temporally discriminative properties of the tasks. One prospective concern was whether or not these performances represented behaviors like those seen in human cognitive discriminations of frequency of occurrence.
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Treichler, F.R., Petros, T.V. Informational properties of infinite numbers of objects in concurrent discriminations by monkeys. Animal Learning & Behavior 19, 95–100 (1991). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197865
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197865