A novel task for the investigation of action acquisition.
We present a behavioural task designed for the investigation of how novel instrumental actions are discovered and learnt. The task consists of free movement with a manipulandum, during which the full range of possible movements can be explored by the participant and recorded. A subset of these movements, the 'target', is set to trigger a reinforcing signal. The task is to discover what movements of the manipulandum evoke the reinforcement signal. Targets can be defined in spatial, temporal, or kinematic terms, can be a combination of these aspects, or can represent the concatenation of actions into a larger gesture. The task allows the study of how the specific elements of behaviour which cause the reinforcing signal are identified, refined and stored by the participant. The task provides a paradigm where the exploratory motive drives learning and as such we view it as in the tradition of Thorndike [1]. Most importantly it allows for repeated measures, since when a novel action is acquired the criterion for triggering reinforcement can be changed requiring a new action to be discovered. Here, we present data using both humans and rats as subjects, showing that our task is easily scalable in difficulty, adaptable across species, and produces a rich set of behavioural measures offering new and valuable insight into the action learning process.
Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom. t.stafford@shef.ac.uk
Tom
T
Stafford
Martin
M
Thirkettle
Tom
T
Walton
Nicolas
N
Vautrelle
Len
L
Hetherington
Michael
M
Port
Kevin
K
Gurney
Pete
P
Redgrave
D000818:Animals; D001519:Behavior; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D051381:Rats; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis