Abstract
In four experiments, the effect of sequential exposure to a series of five novel flavors on the subsequent neophobic response of water-deprived rats to those flavors when they were presented simultaneously was examined. After a list-test interval of 30 min and a list-interstimulus interval of 10 sec, the rats generally consumed more of the first and last flavors presented in the initial sequence. This finding was taken to reflect the existence of primacy and recency effects. Experiment 1 provided evidence that successive contamination can occur between flavors in the initial list, making subsequent recognition of later flavors in the list more difficult. However, this effect was overcome by presentation of water between each flavor during the list exposure. Experiments 2 and 4 showed that primacy was not a necessary result of successive contamination in this procedure, by demonstrating that increasing the interstimulus interval between list items decreased the size of the primacy effect. This result suggests that rats’ memory for serially presented items may be controlled by mechanisms different from those typically implicated in the human verbal memory literature. In Experiment 3, the question of whether the testing procedure adopted here could have introduced sources of artifactually produced serialposition effects was explored, but no such influence was found.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Atkinson, R. C., &Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In K. W. Spence & J. T. Spence (Eds.),The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 2, pp. 89–195). NewYork: Academic Press.
Baddeley, A., Papagno, C., &Andrade, J. (1993). The sandwich effect: The role of attentional factors in serial recall.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,19, 862–870.
Bolhuis, J. J., &Van Kampen, H. S. (1988). Serial position curves in spatial memory of rats: Primacy and recency effects.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,40B, 135–149.
Buffalo, B., Gaffan, D., &Murray, E. A. (1994). A primacy effect in monkeys when list position is relevant.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,47B, 353–369.
Cook, R. G., Wright, A. A., &Sands, S. F. (1991). Interstimulus interval and viewing time effects in monkey list memory.Animal Learning & Behavior,19, 153–163.
Deacon, R. M. J., &Rawlins, J. N. P. (1995). Serial position effects and duration of memory for nonspatial stimuli in rats.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,21, 285–292.
DiMattia, B. V., &Kesner, R. P. (1984). Serial position curves in rats: Automatic versus effortful information processing.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,10, 557–563.
Gaffan, D. (1983). A comment on primacy effects in monkeys’ memory for lists.Animal Learning & Behavior,11, 144–145.
Gaffan, E. A. (1992). Primacy, recency, and the variability of data in studies of animals’ working memory.Animal Learning & Behavior,20, 240–252.
Glazner, M., &Cunitz, A. R. (1966). Two storage mechanisms in free-recall.Journal of Verbal Behavior & Verbal Learning,5, 351–360.
Hall, G. (1991).Perceptual and associative learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press.
Harper, D. N., McLean, A. P., &Dalrymple-Alford, J. C. (1993). List item memory in rats: Effect of delay and delay task.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,19, 307–316.
Johnson, G. J. (1991). A distinctiveness model of serial learning.Psychological Review,98, 204–217.
Macphail, E. M. (1980). Short-term visual recognition in pigeons.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,32B, 521–538.
Neath, I. (1993). Contextual and distinctiveness processes and the serial position function.Journal of Memory & Language,32, 820–840.
Reed, P. (1994). Less than expected variance in studies of serial position effects is not a sufficient reason for caution.Animal Learning & Behavior,22, 224–230.
Reed, P. (1998). Absence of backward scan mechanism triggered by salient stimuli in human serial list learning.Learning & Motivation,29, 133–151.
Reed, P. (2000). Serial position effects in human olfactory memory.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,26, 411–422.
Reed, P., Chih-Ta, T., Aggleton, J. P., &Rawlins, J. N. P. (1991). Primacy, recency, and the von Restorff effect in rats’ nonspatial recognition memory.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,17, 36–44.
Reed, P., Croft, H., &Yeomans, M. (1996). Rats’ memory for serially presented novel flavours: Evidence for non-spatial primacy effects.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,49B, 174–187.
Reed, P., &Richards, A. (1996). The von Restorff effect in rats (Rattus norvegicus).Journal of Comparative Psychology,110, 193–198.
Roberts, W. A., &Kraemer, P. J. (1981). Recognition memory for lists of visual stimuli in monkeys and humans.Animal Learning & Behavior,9, 587–594.
Sands, S. R., &Wright, A. A. (1980). Primate memory: Recognition of serial list items by a rhesus monkey.Science,209, 938–939.
Schmidt, S. R. (1991). Can we have a distinctive theory of memory?Memory & Cognition,19, 523–542.
Thompson, R. K. R., &Herman, L. M. (1977). Memory for lists of sounds by the bottlenosed dolphin: Convergence of memory processes with humans?Science,195, 501–503.
Wixted, J. T. (1986). Nonhuman short-term memory: A quantitative reanalysis of selected findings.Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,52, 409–426.
Wright, A. A., Cook, R. G., Rivera, J. J., &Shyan, M. R. (1990). Naming, rehearsal, and interstimulus interval effects in memory processing.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,16, 1043–1059.
Wright, A. A., Santiago, H. C., Sands, S. F., Kendrick, F. F., &Cook, R. G. (1985). Memory processing of serial lists by pigeons, monkeys, and people.Science,229, 287–289.
Wynne, C. D. L. (1995). Reinforcement accounts for transitive inference performance.Animal Learning & Behavior,23, 207–217.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
These data were initially discussed at the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour Group Meeting, London. Thanks are due Jennifer Hewitt for help in collecting these data, Todd Schachtman for reading earlier drafts of this report, and Lisa A. Osborne for her support.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Reed, P. Rats’ memory for serially presented flavors: Effects of interstimulus interval and generalization decrement. Animal Learning & Behavior 28, 136–146 (2000). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200249
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200249