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Acquisition and transfer of visual Go/No-go discrimination by a chimpanzee

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Abstract

An adolescent female chimpanzee was trained to press a key in the presence of a computer-graphic geometric figure (“Go” stimulus) within 5 sec and not to press the key during 5-sec presentations of another figure (“No-go” stimulus) with food reinforcement. In the acquisition training, the accuracy of performance increased primarily as a result of learning to inhibit key presses in No-go trials. The chimpanzee acquired this “Go/No-go” visual discrimination task in 1,260 trials. She was then given 14 successive transfer problems. The results for these problems suggested that learning-set formation and repeated use of the same discriminative stimuli both influenced transfer to new problems.

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Tomonaga, M., Ohta, H. Acquisition and transfer of visual Go/No-go discrimination by a chimpanzee. Primates 31, 439–447 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02381116

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02381116

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