Abstract
Ability to recall the timing of events is a crucial aspect of associative learning. Yet, traditional theories of associative learning have often overlooked the role of time in learning association and shaping the behavioral outcome. They address temporal learning as an independent and parallel process. Temporal Coding Hypothesis is an attempt to bringing together the associative and non-associative aspects of learning. This account proposes temporal maps, a representation that encodes several aspects of a learned association, but attach considerable importance to the temporal aspect. A temporal map helps an agent to make inferences about missing information by applying an integration mechanism over a common element present in independently acquired temporal maps. We review the empirical evidence demonstrating the construct of temporal maps and discuss the importance of this concept in clinical and behavioral interventions.
Highlights
In a simple classical conditioning task, the computational goal of the agent is to accurately predict the arrival of the unconditioned stimulus (US) with respect to the conditioned stimulus (CS)
This indicate the sensitivity to the temporal aspects in associative learning
The current review focused on excitatory learning, but temporal aspects will affect for example inhibitory learning
Summary
In a simple classical conditioning task, the computational goal of the agent is to accurately predict the arrival of the unconditioned stimulus (US) with respect to the conditioned stimulus (CS). The behavioral response (CR) is based on the learned statistical relationship between the two stimuli (that the airport would arrive after station A) and on their precise temporal relationship (30 min). Associative learning theories have evolved over the last 50 years and successfully accounted for several phenomena observed during a classical conditioning procedure (Thorwart and Livesey, 2016) Despite this success, they failed to account for several other aspects influencing the associative learning mechanism (Savastano and Miller, 1998; Delamater et al, 2014; Molet and Miller, 2014). Temporal Maps and Associative Learning construct, which is a mental representation encoding the temporal and associative aspects of an association (Savastano and Miller, 1998; Arcediano and Miller, 2002). (4) Subjects can superimpose independently acquired temporal maps, which share a common element and thereby allowing the expression of the temporal relationship between events that were never paired together
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