Absolute and relative knowledge of ordinal position on implied lists

Transitive inference in a clinical childhood sample with a focus on autism spectrum disorder

Transitive inference (TI) has a long history in the study of human development. There have, however, few pediatric studies that report clinical diagnoses have tested trial-and-error TI learning, in which participants infer item relations, rather than evaluate them explicitly from verbal descriptions. Children aged 8-10 underwent a battery of clinical assessments and received a range of diagnoses, potentially including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention-deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), anxiety disorders (AD), specific learning disorders (SLD), and/or communication disorders (CD). Participants also performed a trial-and-error learning task that tested for TI. Response accuracy and reaction time were assessed using a statistical model that controlled for diagnostic comorbidity at the group level. Participants in all diagnostic categories showed evidence of TI. However, a model comparison analysis suggested that those diagnosed with ASD succeeded in a qualitatively different way, responding more slowly to each choice and improving faster across trials than their non-ASD counterparts. Additionally, TI performance was not associated with IQ. Overall, our data suggest that superficially similar performance levels between ASD and non-ASD participants may have resulted from a difference in the speed-accuracy tradeoff made by each group. Our work provides a preliminary profile of the impact of various clinical diagnoses on TI performance in young children. Of these, an ASD diagnosis resulted in the largest difference in task strategy.

Sleep-related benefits to transitive inference are modulated by encoding strength and joint rank

Transitive inference is a measure of relational learning that has been shown to improve across sleep. Here, we examine this phenomenon further by studying the impact of encoding strength and joint rank. In experiment 1, participants learned adjacent premise pairs and were then tested on inferential problems derived from those pairs. In line with prior work, we found improved transitive inference performance after retention across a night of sleep compared with wake alone. Experiment 2 extended these findings using a within-subject design and found superior transitive inference performance on a hierarchy, consolidated across 27 h including sleep compared with just 3 h of wake. In both experiments, consolidation-related improvement was enhanced when presleep learning (i.e., encoding strength) was stronger. We also explored the interaction of these effects with the joint rank effect, in which items were scored according to their rank in the hierarchy, with more dominant item pairs having the lowest scores. Interestingly, the consolidation-related benefit was greatest for more dominant inference pairs (i.e., those with low joint rank scores). Overall, our findings provide further support for the improvement of transitive inference across a consolidation period that includes sleep. We additionally show that encoding strength and joint rank strongly modulate this effect.

Thinking about order: a review of common processing of magnitude and learned orders in animals

Rich behavioral and neurobiological evidence suggests cognitive and neural overlap in how quantitatively comparable dimensions such as quantity, time, and space are processed in humans and animals. While magnitude domains such as physical magnitude, time, and space represent information that can be quantitatively compared (4 "is half of" 8), they also represent information that can be organized ordinally (1→2→3→4). Recent evidence suggests that the common representations seen across physical magnitude, time, and space domains in humans may be due to their common ordinal features rather than their common quantitative features, as these common representations appear to extend beyond magnitude domains to include learned orders. In this review, we bring together separate lines of research on multiple ordinal domains including magnitude-based and learned orders in animals to explore the extent to which there is support for a common cognitive process underlying ordinal processing. Animals show similarities in performance patterns across natural quantitatively comparable ordered domains (physical magnitude, time, space, dominance) and learned orders (acquired through transitive inference or simultaneous chaining). Additionally, they show transfer and interference across tasks within and between ordinal domains that support the theory of a common ordinal representation across domains. This review provides some support for the development of a unified theory of ordinality and suggests areas for future research to better characterize the extent to which there are commonalities in cognitive processing of ordinal information generally.

Efecto de la contigüidad espacial sobre el aprendizaje de secuencias de posiciones

Cuatro condiciones de contigüidad espacial de posiciones fueron empleadas para evaluar el aprendizaje de secuencias. Se emplearon dos secuencias de 16 y 25 posiciones presentadas en dos matrices de 4×4 y 5×5, respectivamente. Dentro de cada matriz, 4 (en la matriz de 4×4) o 6 posiciones (en la matriz de 5×5) presentaron contigüidad espacial. Entre grupos, se varió el punto de la secuencia en el que se presentaron las posiciones contiguas. De este modo, la contigüidad espacial de las 4 o 6 posiciones se presentó al inicio de la secuencia (Grupo 1), en la parte media (Grupo 2), al final de la secuencia (Grupo 3), o bien, se presentó una secuencia en la que todas las posiciones ocurrieron sin contigüidad espacial (Grupo 4). Participaron 28 estudiantes de licenciatura. Los resultados no mostraron diferencias entre grupos en cuanto al número de ensayos requeridospara reproducir la secuencia correctamente. El número de errores fue menor cuando las posiciones contiguas se presentaron al inicio de la secuencia. Los hallazgos se explican a partir de un posible efecto de acentuación de la primacía, dado por la ocurrencia de posiciones contiguas al inicio de la secuencia.

Influence of Rule- and Reward-based Strategies on Inferences of Serial Order by Monkeys

Knowledge of transitive relationships between items can contribute to learning the order of a set of stimuli from pairwise comparisons. However, cognitive mechanisms of transitive inferences based on rank order remain unclear, as are relative contributions of reward associations and rule-based inference. To explore these issues, we created a conflict between rule- and reward-based learning during a serial ordering task. Rhesus macaques learned two lists, each containing five stimuli that were trained exclusively with adjacent pairs. Selection of the higher-ranked item resulted in rewards. "Small reward" lists yielded two drops of fluid reward, whereas "large reward" lists yielded five drops. Following training of adjacent pairs, monkeys were tested on novels pairs. One item was selected from each list, such that a ranking rule could conflict with preferences for large rewards. Differences between the corresponding reward magnitudes had a strong influence on accuracy, but we also observed a symbolic distance effect. That provided evidence of a rule-based influence on decisions. RT comparisons suggested a conflict between rule- and reward-based processes. We conclude that performance reflects the contributions of two strategies and that a model-based strategy is employed in the face of a strong countervailing reward incentive.

Positional inference in rhesus macaques

Understanding how organisms make transitive inferences is critical to understanding their general ability to learn serial relationships. In this context, transitive inference (TI) can be understood as a specific heuristic that applies broadly to many different serial learning tasks, which have been the focus of hundreds of studies involving dozens of species. In the present study, monkeys learned the order of 7-item lists of photographic stimuli by trial and error, and were then tested on "derived" lists. These derived test lists combined stimuli from multiple training lists in ambiguous ways, sometimes changing their order relative to training. We found that subjects displayed strong preferences when presented with novel test pairs, even when those pairs were drawn from different training lists. These preferences were helpful when test pairs had an ordering congruent with their ranks during training, but yielded consistently below-chance performance when pairs had an incongruent order relative to training. This behavior can be explained by the joint contributions of transitive inference and another heuristic that we refer to as "positional inference." Positional inferences play a complementary role to transitive inferences in facilitating choices between novel pairs of stimuli. The theoretical framework that best explains both transitive and positional inferences is a spatial model that represents both the position of each stimulus and its uncertainty. A computational implementation of this framework yields accurate predictions about both correct responses and errors on derived lists.