What are the primary ways to test adaptation and evolution of a cognitive trait?

Question

What are the primary ways to test adaptation and evolution of a cognitive trait?

What is the learning-performance distinction? How should it affect how we interpret what animals know from their behavior in experiments?

What is the difference between the US, the CS, and the CR? What do the abbreviations stand for?

What are some aspects that matter in how strong learning will be? What are the effects of temporal relationships, prior learning, how trials are massed or spaced, etc.? What is latent inhibition? What do we mean by contingency of the US and CS and why does it matter?

Explanation / Answer

Evolution of cognitive traits refers to new thinking emerging as a natural selection to adapt adequately. There are several ways through which this can be tested:

The animals do learn the behavior using the conditioning for example in the Pavlov’s experiment the dog learns that as soon as the bell rings, it would be provided with the food. The performance is how well one does on a task, like in the above example the dog’s performance is measured by how much it salivates when the bell rings.

CS stands for Conditioned Stimulus- CS is paired with the unconditioned stimulus which elicits the unconditioned response (that is evoked by the unconditioned stimulus). It can be distinguished on the following features:

CR stands for Conditioned Response- It is the consequence of the paired presentation of the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus.

The effects of the following on learning:

Latent Inhibition is a phenomenon of classical conditioning which states that learning of new things or concepts are easier as compared to unlearn something with which we are familiar as it gets categorized and stored in the form of concepts in the long-term memory.

Contingency refers to the unpredictability of a behavior to occur and gives information about the likelihood of the occurrence of certain facts.

It is not necessary that pairing of unconditioned stimulus and conditioned stimulus would produce learning but it is necessary for the conditioned stimulus to be significant of the contingency.

It is important and does matter a lot because it might evoke learned helplessness in individuals where they have no control in a situation as a result they do not do anything to solve their problems.

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