Cognitive Mechanisms of Serially Organized Behavior

串行组织行为的认知机制

• 批准号: 7682066
• 负责人: HERBERT S. TERRACE
• 金额: $ 30.68万
• 依托单位: COLUMBIA UNIV NEW YORK MORNINGSIDE
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-09-02 至 2012-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7682066
• 关键词: Adult; Animals; Behavior; Child; Child Development; Child Mental Health; Cognitive; Cues; Data; Development; Electroconvulsive Therapy; Goals; Human; Knowledge; Laboratories; Learning; Linguistics; Location; Macaca mulatta; Maps; Mediating; Memory; Methods; Modality; Modeling; Monitor; Monkeys; Motor; Neurosciences; Performance; Positioning Attribute; Psychophysiology; Randomized; Research; Retrograde amnesia; Rewards; Sampling; Serial Learning; Social Dominance; Space Perception; Stimulus; Testing; Time; Touch sensation; Training; Translating; autism spectrum disorder; autistic children; base; comparative; developmental disease; flexibility; magnetic seizure therapy; novel diagnostics; relating to nervous system; research study; tool

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Ordinal relationships exert a pervasive influence on behavior. In the laboratory, ordinal knowledge has been studied in a variety of experiments on both humans and animals. Examples include transitive inference (TI) based on reward contingency or social dominance, knowledge of ordinal relationships between items trained by the simultaneous chaining (SC) paradigm, and extrapolations of ascending and descending rules in the case of numerical stimuli. RT and accuracy data from these studies reveal very similar distance and magnitude effects in humans and animals, implying that they use similar nonverbal strategies. The results of these experiments have opened a new line of research on serial learning that has the potential for defining non-linguistic primitives that are shared by animals and humans. The goal of the proposed research is to explore the concept of an ordinal comparator that represents and integrates ordinal information from different ordinal continua. Two basic features of the ordinal comparator are (1) it does not make any assumptions about linguistic ability and (2) it integrates existing data on ordinal knowledge. Our experiments, which will be performed on rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) and adult humans, will use a variety of proven methods (simultaneous chaining, transitive inference, numerical, psychophysical, and spatial discrimination tasks) for training monkeys to execute lists composed of arbitrary stimuli and by stimuli that can be characterized as inherently ordered. On an SC, arbitrary list items (usually photographs) are presented simultaneously on a touch sensitive video monitor. The spatial positions of items within an SC are randomized to minimize spatial and motor cues, except in the case of spatial tasks, in which they are intended to convey ordinal information. On an SC, subjects must learn to generate a representation of the entire sequence and their current position in that sequence, as they move from item to item. Under the TI paradigm, the subject is rewarded each time it chooses an arbitrarily defined correct item from pairs of arbitrarily selected stimuli. Subjects are then tested on their ability to infer the correct item from pairs of non-adjacent items. Numerical stimuli will be trained by conceptual and symbolic matching-to- sample paradigms. Our major hypothesis is that positive transfer will occur between two ordinal tasks, whether spatial, numerical, psychophysical, serial or transitive, to the extent that the representations that mediate each task are isomorphic. Toward that end, we propose 4 lines of comparative research on the non-verbal representation of ordinal distance and numerical magnitude. The proposed research has important interdisciplinary ramifications for studies of neuroscience (neural correlates of ordinal memory), child development (nonverbal tests for autistic children), and mental health (cognitive tests of ordinal memory during electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and magnetic seizure therapy (MST)).The proposed research will advance understanding of the representation of order in humans and monkeys. This line of research is already being applied directly to studies of anterograde and retrograde amnesia induced by ECT and TMS. In addition we expect the results to have implications for the development of new diagnostic tools for autism spectrum disorder.

描述（由申请人提供）：顺序关系对行为产生普遍影响。在实验室中，序数知识已通过针对人类和动物的各种实验进行了研究。例子包括基于奖励偶然性或社会支配地位的传递推理（TI）、由同时链接（SC）范式训练的项目之间的顺序关系的知识，以及在数字刺激的情况下的升序和降序规则的外推。这些研究的 RT 和准确性数据揭示了人类和动物中非常相似的距离和幅度效应，这意味着他们使用相似的非语言策略。这些实验的结果开辟了一条关于串行学习的新研究路线，它有可能定义动物和人类共享的非语言原语。拟议研究的目标是探索序数比较器的概念，该比较器表示和集成来自不同序数连续体的序数信息。序数比较器的两个基本特征是（1）它不对语言能力做出任何假设；（2）它集成了有关序数知识的现有数据。我们的实验将在恒河猴（Macaca mulatta）和成年人身上进行，将使用各种经过验证的方法（同时链接、传递推理、数值、心理物理和空间辨别任务）来训练猴子执行由任意列表组成的列表。刺激以及可以被表征为固有有序的刺激。在 SC 上，任意列表项（通常是照片）同时显示在触摸敏感视频监视器上。 SC 内项目的空间位置是随机的，以最大限度地减少空间和运动线索，但空间任务除外，在空间任务中，它们旨在传达顺序信息。在 SC 上，当受试者从一个项目移动到另一个项目时，他们必须学会生成整个序列以及他们在该序列中当前位置的表示。在 TI 范式下，每当受试者从任意选择的刺激对中选择任意定义的正确项目时，就会获得奖励。然后测试受试者从成对的不相邻项目中推断出正确项目的能力。数字刺激将通过概念和符号匹配样本范式进行训练。我们的主要假设是，两个有序任务之间会发生正迁移，无论是空间任务、数字任务、心理物理任务、序列任务还是传递任务，只要介导每个任务的表征是同构的。为此，我们提出了关于序数距离和数值大小的非语言表示的 4 条比较研究。拟议的研究对于神经科学（序数记忆的神经相关性）、儿童发展（自闭症儿童的非语言测试）和心理健康（电休克治疗（ECT）和磁癫痫治疗（MST）期间序数记忆的认知测试）的研究具有重要的跨学科影响。 ））。拟议的研究将增进对人类和猴子的秩序表征的理解。该系列研究已直接应用于 ECT 和 TMS 诱发的顺行性和逆行性遗忘症的研究。此外，我们预计这些结果将对自闭症谱系障碍新诊断工具的开发产生影响。