Elsevier

Behavioural Processes

Volume 71, Issues 2–3, 28 February 2006, Pages 88-97
Behavioural Processes

Review
Timing, memory for intervals, and memory for untimed stimuli: The role of instructional ambiguity

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2005.07.008Get rights and content

Abstract

Theories of animal timing have had to account for findings that the memory for the duration of a timed interval appears to be dramatically shorted within a short time of its termination. This finding has led to the subjective shortening hypothesis and it has been proposed to account for the poor memory that animals appear to have for the initial portion of a timed interval when a gap is inserted in the to-be-timed signal. It has also been proposed to account for the poor memory for a relatively long interval that has been discriminated from a shorter interval. I suggest here a simpler account in which ambiguity between the gap or retention interval and the intertrial interval results in resetting the clock, rather than forgetting the interval. The ambiguity hypothesis, together with a signal salience mechanism that determines how quickly the clock is reset at the start of the intertrial interval can account for the results of the reported timing experiments that have used the peak procedure. Furthermore, instructional ambiguity rather than memory loss may account for the results of many animal memory experiments that do not involve memory for time.

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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    This article is a reprint of the article previously published in Behaviour Processes, volume 70, issue 3, pages 209–222.

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