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Spontaneous integration of temporal information: implications for representational/computational capacity of animals

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Abstract

How do animals adapt their behaviors to changing conditions? This question relates to the debate between associative versus representational/computational approaches in cognitive science. An influential line of research that has significantly shaped the conceptual development of animal learning over decades has primarily focused on the role of associative dynamics with little-to-no ascription of representational/combinatorial capacities. The common assumption of these models is that behavioral adjustments are incremental and they result from updating of associations based on actions and their outcomes, without encoding the critical information serving as the determinant(s) of such contingencies (e.g., time in interval schedules, number in ratio schedules). On the other hand, an independent line of research provides evidence for behavioral phenomena that cannot be readily accounted for by the conventional associationist approach. In this paper, we will review different sets of findings particularly in the area of interval timing that suggest the ability of animals to make swift spontaneous computations on subjective quantities and incorporate them into their behavior. Findings of these studies constitute empirical challenges for the associationist approaches to behavioral flexibility. We argue that interval timing is a fertile ground for the formulation of critical tests of different theoretical approaches to animal behavior.

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Notes

  1. Regarding the interpretation of their results, although Tolman et al. (1946) discussed the possibility that rats might have simply ran toward the light during testing, they asserted that light was an orientational cue for the goal box location and not a CS. Otherwise, rats would have chosen the neighboring paths as often as the most preferred path since all paths were lid from similar angles while none of them (including the most preferred path) was identical to the training context.

  2. It is important to note that when two response units that are independently tuned to respond after two different intervals become concurrently activated upon the simultaneous signaling of both options, it could also abruptly lead to the timed switching pattern. This can be addressed within the framework of behavioral models of interval timing that assume that organisms keep track of time via the sequential activation of the units that are connected in a chain-like fashion, and these “timing units” can be associated with different responses (e.g., Carvalho et al. 2016; Machado 1997). When the activation strength of responses by “timing units” is proportional to the trial probability (simply due to higher relative frequency of associative updating), this would also capture the modulation of switch times as a function of probability manipulations. The representational assumptions of such a framework are weaker than those accounts outlined above as in the former case temporal information would be embedded in the sequentially activated units of the chain. That having been said, this would also be functionally equivalent to the operation of a pacemaker–accumulator mechanism that leads to magnitude representations (Balcı and Simen 2016). Furthermore, since the associative weights would saturate (at the higher and lower limits as a function of strengthening/acquisition and weakening/extinction, respectively) with high numbers of training trials, the sensitivity of switch times to probability values would disappear. In the latter case, mutual inhibition between the units processing two different response locations and parameterizing the degrees of inhibition by the corresponding option probabilities would be needed to recover the probability-sensitive switching pattern. Consequently, although the approaches outlined above can be conceptualized as an alternative to the representational/computational approach, their implicit assumptions would constitute approximations to the representational/computational view.

  3. The scalar property of interval timing dictates that the ratio between the standard deviation and mean of the response times (i.e., coefficient of variation) stays constant for different target durations for an individual subject. This explains the Weber’s Law, which dictates that the discriminability of two magnitudes is a function of their ratios.

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Funding

This work was supported by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK 111K402) to FB and Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA GEBİP 2015) to FB. The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey supports EG by National Scholarship Programme for Ph.D. students (TÜBİTAK BİDEB 2211E).

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Correspondence to Fuat Balcı.

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Gür, E., Duyan, Y.A. & Balcı, F. Spontaneous integration of temporal information: implications for representational/computational capacity of animals. Anim Cogn 21, 3–19 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-017-1137-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-017-1137-z

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