Control of responding by sound location in monkeys: rapid acquisition in darkness.

Researchers worked with monkeys in a dark lab. They taught the animals to press a key when a sound came from the left side.

The team ran the same lesson in bright light and in total darkness. They wanted to see if the monkeys needed to see anything to learn the sound task.

Monkeys learned the sound task just as fast in the dark as in the light. Visual cues made no difference.

The animals reached accurate responding in only a few sessions, showing pure auditory control can be set up quickly.

Terrace (1969) showed monkeys can learn lever-pulling avoidance through shaping. Both studies prove monkeys pick up new operant responses fast.

Murphy (1982) argues orienting responses are autoshaped by stimulus-reinforcer pairings. The target paper adds that this works for auditory location too, not just visual cues.

Mellitz et al. (1983) found gerbils mastered a 17-arm maze quickly. Like the monkeys, they showed rapid spatial learning, but used brightness cues instead of sound.

You can teach auditory discrimination without any visual help. This is useful for clients with visual impairments or when you want to isolate auditory skills. Try running sound discrimination trials with lights off to check if vision is helping or hurting the learning.