Abstract
The performances of adult and aged macaque monkeys were compared on several tasks requiring acquisition and retention of concurrent object discriminations. Cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons between 11-year-old and over-20-year-old animals were conducted on the acquisition of several 16-problem concurrent tasks, and after 2 weeks, retention by the different age groups was also evaluated. Although the retention tests indicated no age-related impairment, acquisition tests showed that aged animals made reliably more errors-to-criterion than did adult animals. The relative contributions of intersession and intrasession improvement and preference phenomena were considered and contrasted to some previously reported age-specific outcomes. Although the present results affirmed the contention that old animals were selectively impaired on intersession task requirements, some earlier interpretations of preference effects were questioned. Old animals did not show a potentiation of specific object preferences; rather, they tended to be nonsystematic in maintaining their selection of initially preferred objects. Concurrent discrimination was indicated to be a behavioral measure that is, under appropriate circumstances, selectively sensitive to aging and may offer an appropriate comparative model of information-processing characteristics.
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Portions of this work served as the first author’s master’s thesis at Kent State University and were presented as a paper at the Midwestern Psychological Association meetings in 1989. The authors wish to acknowledge the assistance of Y. Hines in animal care and testing. We also express appreciation for the very constructive suggestions of our anonymous Reviewer A.
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Bakner, L., Treichler, F.R. Age differences in the acquisition and retention of concurrent discriminations by monkeys. Animal Learning & Behavior 21, 51–58 (1993). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197976
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197976