Rats can make relative perceptual judgments about sequential stimuli

Animal Cognition
Clint Perry, Gidon Felsen

Abstract

In their natural environment, animals often make decisions based on abstract relationships among multiple stimulus representations. Humans and other primates can determine not only whether a sensory stimulus differs from a remembered sensory representation, but also how they differ along a particular dimension. However, much remains unknown about how such relative comparisons are made, and which species share this capacity, in part because most studies of sensory-guided decision making have utilized instrumental tasks in which choices are based on very simple stimulus-response associations. Here, we used a two-stimulus-interval discrimination task to test whether rats could determine how two sequentially presented stimuli were related along the dimension of odor quality (i.e., what the stimulus smells like). At a central port, rats sampled and compared two odor mixtures that consisted of spearmint and caraway in different ratios, separated by a 2-4-s interval, and then entered the left or right reward port. Water was delivered at the left if the first mixture consisted of more spearmint than the second did, and at the right otherwise. We found that the difference in mixture ratio predicted choice accuracy. Control experiments s...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jan 23, 2014·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Arash FassihiMathew E Diamond
Feb 12, 2017·Frontiers in Neural Circuits·Takahiro NodaHirokazu Takahashi
Mar 28, 2018·Neuroscience Research·Takahiro Noda, Hirokazu Takahashi

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