Implicit sequence learning in ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta).
Ring-tailed lemurs can silently learn the order of places on a screen, showing that spatial sequence learning is a basic brain skill.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Scientists gave ring-tailed lemurs a touchscreen game.
The screen lit up four squares in the same order again and again.
Lemurs tapped the squares and got fruit bits for correct touches.
The team watched if the animals got faster even when they did not know the pattern.
What they found
Lemurs tapped the spatial order quicker after many rounds.
Their fingers moved before the next square lit up, showing hidden learning.
They did not learn a second game that used picture names instead of places.
Only the place pattern stuck, proving lemurs learn space without awareness.
How this fits with other research
Bacon-Prue et al. (1980) saw the same speed-up in pigeons that pecked two lights in order.
Both studies show non-humans pick up order without being told, just by doing.
Nadel et al. (2011) got non-verbal kids with autism to copy a long chain after two videos.
The kids needed a model; the lemurs did not.
This tells us implicit learning is older and needs fewer cues than observational learning.
Why it matters
You now know that even simple minds track place patterns without rules or words.
When you build motor chains for clients, start with stable places first.
Hide the order in the room layout before you add names or colors.
Let the learner move; the body will remember the path.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Implicit learning involves picking up information from the environment without explicit instruction or conscious awareness of the learning process. In nonhuman animals, conscious awareness is impossible to assess, so we define implicit learning as occurring when animals acquire information beyond what is required for successful task performance. While implicit learning has been documented in some nonhuman species, it has not been explored in prosimian primates. Here we ask whether ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta) learn sequential information implicitly. We tested lemurs in a modified version of the serial reaction time task on a touch screen computer. Lemurs were required to respond to any picture within a 2 × 2 grid of pictures immediately after its surrounding border flickered. Over 20 training sessions, both the locations and the identities of the images remained constant and response times gradually decreased. Subsequently, the locations and/or the identities of the images were disrupted. Response times indicated that the lemurs had learned the physical location sequence required in original training but did not learn the identity of the images. Our results reveal that ring-tailed lemurs can implicitly learn spatial sequences, and raise questions about which scenarios and evolutionary pressures give rise to perceptual versus motor-implicit sequence learning.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2016 · doi:10.1002/jeab.180