ReviewTiming, memory for intervals, and memory for untimed stimuli: The role of instructional ambiguity☆
Section snippets
Interval timing: the peak procedure
Fixed interval schedules of reinforcement have been used to study the ability of animals to judge the passage of time. With these schedules, the first response that occurs after a fixed time results in reinforcement. In the free-operant version of this schedule, the interval begins with the prior reinforcement. In the discrete-trials version of this schedule used most often to study the timing ability of animals, the interval begins with the onset of a stimulus (e.g., a light or a tone).
Interval discrimination
The typical interval discrimination procedure involves a variation of matching-to-sample or a conditional discrimination. Each trial generally starts with a sample stimulus that is presented either for a short interval or a long interval (e.g., at the start of the trial the houselight comes on for either 2 or 10 s). Following the offset of the houselight two comparison stimuli appear (e.g., a red light and green light, one on the left the other on the right). Responses to the red light will be
General support for the ambiguity hypothesis
The focus of this article has been animal timing but as suggested in the introduction, the issues raised have implications for a broader area of study. In general, one must be careful in interpreting the results of any manipulation that involves the transfer of training or the assessment of memory some time after training. Any decrement in performance found may be attributable not only to the variable under study (e.g., memory) but also to the failure of instructions (i.e., a generalization
Conclusions
Much of the research that has attempted to assess memory for time intervals in animals has suffered from what can be called instructional ambiguity. Most often that ambiguity has come from the similarity between the retention interval and the intertrial interval during training. However, other sources of ambiguity may also produce confounds that may obscure temporal memory assessment. Among those are dissimilarity in behavior during the interval to be timed and the retention interval, and the
Acknowledgement
Preparation of this article was facilitated by Grant MH 63726 from the National Institute of Mental Health.
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2022, Behavioural ProcessesCitation Excerpt :In studies where a choose-short effect was found, the intertrial interval (ITI) and the delay were generally signaled in the same fashion: both were spent in darkness. This similarity could lead to instructional ambiguity (Fetterman and MacEwen, 1989; Zentall, 1997, 2006) – the intervals could be confused and if a delay was treated as an ITI, a trial with a delay could be seen as a no-sample trial (given that it would appear that the trial consisted solely of the presentation of the comparisons). To control for this potential confound, delay and ITI have been signaled differently: in some cases, this manipulation removed choice biases, with both samples showing similar retention functions (Sherburne et al., 1998; Spetch and Rusak, 1992), but in other cases a bias for short persisted (Kelly and Spetch, 2000; Pinto and Machado, 2011; Pinto and Sousa, 2021).
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2017, Behavioural ProcessesCitation Excerpt :Nevertheless, the continuous change found here is comparable to the outcomes of other time-estimation studies with shorter intervals. Commonly, the animals’ responses in peak-interval procedures increase steadily throughout the learnt interval and do not show a sharp change shortly before the time of expected reward provisioning (Zentall 2006; Sanabria and Killeen 2007). These patterns were found, for instance, in pigeons (Roberts et al., 1989), rats (Whitaker et al., 2003), and bumble bees (Boisvert and Sherry 2006).
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This article is a reprint of the article previously published in Behaviour Processes, volume 70, issue 3, pages 209–222.