Abstract
In making comparative judgments about pairs of stimuli that are linearly ordered, human subjects usually respond faster the greater the separation between-the-items of a test pair—the symbolic distance effect. A similar result has been obtained for associatively related items, such as the alphabet. We report evidence for a distance effect in monkeys tested with pairs of items drawn from a five-item series with which they had considerable previous experience-in a serial learning setting. This finding provides independent evidence that in learning a serial list of items, monkeys acquire knowledge about the ordinal positions of the items. Analysis of the positive results obtained in Experiment 2 and of the failure to find a distance effect in Experiment 1 suggested that in learning a serial list, monkeys construct both an associative chain representation of the series and a spatial representation, with the latter supplying the spatial markers that convey positional information. This dual coding of sequential events, which may be rather general among mammals, probably supports a variety of cognitive competencies.
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This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant 8417383.
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D’Amato, M.R., Colombo, M. The symbolic distance effect in monkeys (Cebus apella). Animal Learning & Behavior 18, 133–140 (1990). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03205250
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03205250