ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. Animal learning and cognition2014
Effects of spatial training on transitive inference performance in humans and rhesus monkeys.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. Animal learning and cognition, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Learning to infer transitively on a mental line in premotor cortex.Science advances · 2026Article
- Learning Decouples Accuracy and Reaction Time for Rapid Decisions in a Transitive Inference Task.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Cost-effective, open-source, automated apparatus for testing transitive inference in mice.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) rank lists using multiple cognitive mechanisms simultaneously.Journal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · 2025Article
- Probabilistic reinforcement precludes transitive inference: A preliminary study.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Superstitious learning of abstract order from random reinforcement.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Individual differences could explain the failure in transitive inference formation in pigeons using probabilistic reinforcement.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) show subtle signs of uncertainty when choices are more difficult.Cognition · 2021Article
- Towards a resolution of some outstanding issues in transitive research: An empirical test on middle childhood.Learning & behavior · 2021Article
- Preserved visual memory and relational cognition performance in monkeys with selective hippocampal lesions.Science advances · 2020Article
- Learned Representation of Implied Serial Order in Posterior Parietal Cortex.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Associative models fail to characterize transitive inference performance in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta).Learning & behavior · 2020Article
- Monkey Metacognition Could Generate More Insight.Animal behavior and cognition · 2019Article
- Limited evidence of number-space mapping in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) and capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella).Journal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · 2019Article
- Reward associations do not explain transitive inference performance in monkeys.Science advances · 2019Article
- Developmental grey matter changes in superior parietal cortex accompany improved transitive reasoning.Thinking & reasoning · 2019Article
- Neuronal Modulation in the Prefrontal Cortex in a Transitive Inference Task: Evidence of Neuronal Correlates of Mental Schema Management.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2016Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
It is often suggested that transitive inference (TI; if A > B and B > C, then A > C) involves mentally representing overlapping pairs of stimuli in a spatial series. However, there is little direct evidence to unequivocally determine the role of spatial representation in TI. We tested whether humans and rhesus monkeys use spatial representations in TI by training them to organize 7 images in a vertical spatial array. Then, we presented subjects with a TI task using these same images. The implied TI order was either congruent or incongruent with the order of the trained spatial array. Humans in the congruent condition learned premise pairs more quickly, and were faster and more accurate in critical probe tests, suggesting that the spatial arrangement of images learned during spatial training influenced subsequent TI performance. Monkeys first trained in the congruent condition also showed higher test trial accuracy when the spatial and inferred orders were congruent. These results directly support the hypothesis that humans solve TI problems by spatial organization, and suggest that this cognitive mechanism for inference may have ancient evolutionary roots.
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