ABSTRACT
The present chapter has three aims. The first is to describe our recent efforts devoted to analyzing the mechanisms employed by cebus monkeys when learning a serial order task. This development begins with a description of some important characteristics of the serial learning achieved by monkeys. In search of persuasive evidence that cebus monkeys are capable of extracting positional information from serially ordered events, we are led to a pair of wild-card experiments and subsequently to a phenomenon much studied in humans—the symbolic distance effect. The second objective may be viewed as an exercise in comparative cognition. I will try to show that although pigeons, like monkeys, can learn four- and five-item series to respectable levels of accuracy, they do so by quite different means. Third in order of listing though not in actual sequence, I will provide an illustration of the possibility of using results from relatively simple tasks to predict species’ differences on more complex tasks. Finally, the chapter closes with some observations regarding the capacity of animals for processing serial pattern, a much more demanding task than dealing with serial order.
