Analysis of a guided-response procedure in visual discriminations by rats.
Guided prompting beats trial-and-error for teaching visual picks, even in rats.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with rats learning a two-choice visual task. They used a retractable bridge to guide the rat’s nose toward the correct picture.
The bridge slowly pulled back as the rat got better. The study compared this guided help to plain trial-and-error.
What they found
Rats that got the guided bridge made fewer wrong picks. Both the bridge method and a slow picture-fading method beat trial-and-error.
In short, gentle hints up front cut mistakes later.
How this fits with other research
Arantes et al. (2011) found the same edge with pigeons on a timing task. Errorless prompting again beat trial-and-error, even across species and tasks.
Nevin (1967) showed monkeys learn tilted-line tasks best when the tilt steps are small. Pritchard et al. (1987) now show the same rule in rats with a physical prompt.
Felipe de Souza et al. (2014) used the same rat set-up but tested exclusion, not prompting. Together they tell us rats can both use and learn from extra help.
Why it matters
If you want cleaner stimulus control with fewer errors, start with heavy help and fade it. Whether you use a bridge, a prompt card, or dimmed pictures, the rule is the same: start easy, then fade. Try adding a brief full prompt at the first trial of a new discrimination and pull it back across five trials. Watch error counts drop.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A guided-response procedure was used to train a visual pattern discrimination by rats in a modified Sutherland box. The method consisted of guiding the animal to the correct choice by means of a retractable bridge that led to reinforcers, followed by gradually removing this prompt. This method was compared to a stimulus-fading procedure, in which the initial differences between discriminative stimuli were gradually faded until they differed only with respect to the critical dimension for discrimination, and to a trial-and-error procedure. Both gradual procedures resulted in fewer errors compared to the trial-and-error procedure. The higher efficiency of the fading procedures was attributed to less aversiveness derived from performance with few errors and to the use of step-by-step requirements relative to the criterion performance.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1987 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1987.47-311