Learning capacities of Tupaiidae—the transitional insectivora-primates

Abstract

A review of the literature on learning by transitional Tupaiidae indicates that they learn traditional operants and their performance on other single problems such as visual pattern and brightness as well as delayed response is comparable with prosimians. However, complex problem learning of delayed alternation and object discrimination learning-set is typically quantitatively inferior to prosimians. The most striking findings involve Tupaiidaeś reversal and nonreversal shift learning-set ability contrasted with their failure to demonstrate cross-modal transfer and evidencing only random presolution strategies. In view of current emphasis on transfer paradigms and analysis of presolutional behavior, the latter findings suggest important differences between Tupaiidae and primates.