The Comparative Psychology of Learning

Abstract

The results surveyed in this chapter do not support the proposition that learning is essentially similar in all animals. Species differences in learning exist in profusion, and can be classified into 2 types: ([alpha]) Interspecies differences on simple, uncomplicated conditioning and discrimination learning tasks appear to reflect predominantly species-characteristic and ecologically determined differences in perceptual and response biases. These differences do not contribute directly to our understanding of the broad phyletic trends in the evolution of learning capacity, but they do provide an impressive amount of evidence to discourage glib and thoughtless generalizations about the behavior of "the" fish, "the" monkey, or even "the" rat. (b) The results obtained from animals on more complex conditioning and discrimination tasks, e.g., serial conditioning and extinction, resistance to extinction after partial reinforcement, repeated reversals of a single discrimination, and the formation and transfer of learning sets, suggest an orderly improvement in the efficiency of learning within the vertebrate series.