ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that cognitive models for human serial pattern learning provide a promising path for the study of comparable problems in animal behavior. The problem of serial order is inherent in the fundamental assumptions of Aristotelian thought and in the tenets of associationism from which so much of twentieth-century thinking about the learning process has derived. But C. L. Hull and B. F. Skinner saw the problem of serial order as a matter of considerable theoretical interest, taking as their point of departure the problem of how responses became chained to form complex serial habits. The structural specification of serial orders, together with study of the psychological properties that serial patterns possess, has occupied cognitive psychologists for some time. Interest has ranged from relatively simple patterns based on strings of numbers, letters, or the like to patterns based on structures associated with time and with time intervals to the complex hierarchical structures associated with western music.
