in press). However, difficulties have been found in developing effective procedures to establish arbitrary visual-visual matching-to-sample baselines with this specie (Huziwara et al., submitted). This is an important challenge for new explorations on this subject. Future studies in this line of research may take into account recent data showing that cooperative or communicative situations between dogs and humans can facilitate the learning of discriminative repertoires in domestic dogs (Souza, Brasiliense, Assumpção, Yonezawa, & Dahás, in preparation). 3C: Relational Learning in Bees
Discrimination learning in New-world bees (Melipona) is understudied, except by the pioneer work of Pessotti. Our studies showed that Melipona quadrifasciata and Melipona rufiventris learned simple discriminations (Moreno, de Souza, & Reinhard, 2012) and identity matching-to-sample (Moreno & de Souza, in press), but not arbitrary matching-to-sample (Moreno et al., 2012). Old-world bees (Apis), in contrast, showed above-chance performance in arbitrary matching, but no indication of symmetry. The difference in performance of the two species may be related to foraging conditions in the environments of these species, and deserve further investigation. In a recent doctoral dissertation (Moreno, 2012) meliponas that learned a simple discrimination were subjected to exclusion probes with new stimuli that substituted for the S- on some trials and S+ in other trials. They exhibited indications of control by selecting the S+ and rejecting the S-. Given the relevance of these stimulus control topographies (see 2A) for the emergence of novel relations, and the fact that when tested for control by elements of compound stimulus Meliponas did not show restricted stimulus control (Moreno et al., in press), this species could provide a suitable model of the precursors of symbolic behavior. 3D: Relational Learning in Pigeons
Research with pigeons was not in our original proposal, but was prompted by other research investigating relational learning with this species. Despite several failures reported in the literature with this species, studies showed promising results of combining conditional temporal-visual and visual-visual conditional discriminations to pigeons, after which the birds showed the emergence of associative symmetry (Velasco, Tomanari, Machado, & Huziwara, 2010) and transitive relations (Huziwara, Velasco, Tomanari, de Souza, & Machado, 2012). See also the studies of Campos et al. (2011; 2014) using go/no go procedures (2B). Animal models (e.g., in monkeys, dogs, bees, pigeons, and recently, rats) are a relevant component of the Institute’s research program, not only in terms of conceptual and methodological developments, but also because of the substantial work designing effective procedures to teach these species. Developing methods of investigating and teaching these species may uncover critical variables for basic learning processes. These variables can then be incorporated into methods
ANNUAL REPORT # 5 (2013-2014) National Institute of Science and Technology on Behavior, Cognition and Teaching
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