In a baseline condition, pigeons chose between an alternative that always provided food following a 30-s delay (100% reinforcement) and an alternative that provided food half of the time and blackout half of the time following 30-s delays (50% reinforcement). The different outcomes were signaled by different-colored keylights. On average, each alternative was chosen approximately equally often,...

A CENTURY OF " UNITY IN CONTIGUITY " Hundred years is a very small time span in the history of mankind, but the last one hundred is by no means small. T r e m e n d o u s p r o g r e s s h a s b e e n m a d e i n m a n y f i e l d s o f science including Neuroscience. Probably it was recognized that this would be the case exactly a century ago when the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine for the...

Psychophysical studies have shown that humans actively exploit temporal information such as contiguity of images in object recognition. We have recently developed a recognition system which uses temporal contiguity to learn extensible representations of objects on-line. The system performs well both on real-world and synthetic data and shows robustness under illumination changes. In this paper,...

Often we need to perform tasks in an environment that changes stochastically. In these situations it is important to learn the statistics of sequences of events in order to predict the future and the outcome of our actions. The statistical description of many of these sequences can be reduced to the set of probabilities that a particular event follows another event (temporal contiguity). Under ...