Abstract: Animal learning research has increasingly used complex stimuli that approximate natural objects, events, and locations, a trend that has accompanied a resurgence of interest in the role of cognitive factors in learning. Accounts of complex stimulus control have focused mainly on cognitive mechanisms and largely ignored the contribution of stimulus information to perception and memory for complex events. It is argued here that research on animal learning stands to benefit from a more detailed consideration of the stimulus and that James Gibson's stimulus-centered theory of perception serves as a useful framework for analyses of complex stimuli. Several issues in the field of animal learning and cognition are considered from the Gibsonian perspective on stimuli, including the fundamental problem of defining the effective stimulus.

Abstract: In a number of mammalian species, males appear to have superior spatial abilities to females. The favoured explanations for this cognitive difference are hormonal, with higher testosterone levels in males than females leading to better spatial performance, and evolutionary, where sexual selection has favoured males with increased spatial abilities for either better navigational skills in hunting or to enable an increased territory size. However, an alternative explanation for this sex difference focuses on the role of varying levels of oestrogen in females in spatial cognition (the 'fertility and parental care' hypothesis). One possibility is that varying oestrogen levels result in variation in spatial learning and memory so that, when tested across the oestrous cycle, females perform as well as males on days of low oestrogen but more poorly on days of high oestrogen. If day in the oestrous cycle is not taken into account then, across an experiment, any sex differences found would always produce male superiority. We used a spatial working memory task in a Morris water maze to test the spatial learning and memory abilities of male and female rats. The rats were tested across a number of consecutive days during which the females went through four oestrous cycles. We found no overall sex differences in latencies to reach a submerged platform in a Morris water maze but, on the day of oestrus (low oestrogen), females took an extra swim to learn the platform's location (a 100% increase over the other days in the cycle). Female swim speed also varied across the oestrous cycle but females were no less active on the day of oestrus. These results oppose the predictions of the fertility and parental care hypothesis.

Abstract: Humans are consciously aware of some memories and can make verbal reports about these memories. Other memories cannot be brought to consciousness, even though they influence behavior. This conspicuous difference in access to memories is central in taxonomies of human memory systems but has been difficult to document in animal studies, suggesting that some forms of memory may be unique to humans. Here I show that rhesus macaque monkeys can report the presence or absence of memory. Although it is probably impossible to document subjective, conscious properties of memory in nonverbal animals, this result objectively demonstrates an important functional parallel with human conscious memory. Animals able to discern the presence and absence of memory should improve accuracy if allowed to decline memory tests when they have forgotten, and should decline tests most frequently when memory is attenuated experimentally. One of two monkeys examined unequivocally met these criteria under all test conditions, whereas the second monkey met them in all but one case. Probe tests were used to rule out “cueing” by a wide variety of environmental and behavioral stimuli, leaving detection of the absence of memory per se as the most likely mechanism underlying the monkeys' abilities to selectively decline memory tests when they had forgotten.