Introduction: Guiding Eyes for the Blind (GEB) breeds, raises, and trains dogs to serve as guides for people with visual impairments (i.e., those who are blind or have low vision). Their puppy raising program enlists volunteers to foster puppies for a year or more, providing socialization, basic skills training, and comfort, so they will grow into…

In 2 studies, we attempted to capture the information-processing abilities underlying children's reality-status judgments. Forty 5- to 6-year-olds and 53 7- to 8-year-olds heard about novel entities (animals) that varied in their fit with children's world knowledge. After hearing about each entity, children could either guess reality status…

Pigeons responded in a perceptual categorization task with six different stimuli (shades of gray), three of which were to be classified as "light" or "dark", respectively. Reinforcement probability for correct responses was varied from 0.2 to 0.6 across blocks of sessions and was unequal for correct light and dark responses. Introduction of a new…

When pigeons are given a choice between two alternatives, one leading to a stimulus 20% of the time that always signals reinforcement (S+) or another stimulus 80% of the time that signals no reinforcement (S-), and the other alternative leading to one of two stimuli each signaling reinforcement 50% of the time, they show a strong preference for…

Parallel experiments with rats and pigeons examined reasons for previous findings that in choices with probabilistic delayed reinforcers, rats' choices were affected by the time between trials whereas pigeons' choices were not. In both experiments, the animals chose between a standard alternative and an adjusting alternative. A choice of the…

Reinforcement learning theories postulate that actions are chosen to maximize a long-term sum of positive outcomes based on value functions, which are subjective estimates of future rewards. In simple reinforcement learning algorithms, value functions are updated only by trial-and-error, whereas they are updated according to the decision-maker's…