ArticleRoyal Society open science2017
Memory for stimulus sequences: a divide between humans and other animals?
Article in Royal Society open science, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 51 citations in OpenAlex.
- Exploring Variation Between Artificial Grammar Learning Experiments: Outlining a Meta-Analysis Approach.Topics in cognitive science · 2020Pooled it
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- One Biology and the Status of Humans.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Review
- Statistical olfactory learning in honey bees.iScience · 2025Article
- Results from ReindlRoyal Society open science · 2025Article
- Humans may not have a uniquely enhanced sequence memory: sequence discrimination is facilitated by causal-logical framing in humans and chimpanzees.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Evolution of diverse (and advanced) cognitive abilities through adaptive fine-tuning of learning and chunking mechanisms.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Sequences and animal intelligence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Teaching Nonarbitrary Temporal Relational Responding in Adolescents with Autism.The Analysis of verbal behavior · 2024Article
- The problem with two-event sequence learning by pigeons.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Sequence representation as an early step in the evolution of language.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- A test of memory for stimulus sequences in great apes.PloS one · 2023Article
- Experts in action: why we need an embodied social brain hypothesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Disjunctive inference in preverbal infants.iScience · 2021Article
- 'Dunbar's number' deconstructed.Biology letters · 2021Article
- A Connectomic Hypothesis for the Hominization of the Brain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Article
- Positional encoding in cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus).Animal cognition · 2019Article
- Neuronal Encoding in a High-Level Auditory Area: From Sequential Order of Elements to Grammatical Structure.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Article
- Social learning through associative processes: a computational theory.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans stand out among animals for their unique capacities in domains such as language, culture and imitation, yet it has been difficult to identify cognitive elements that are specifically human. Most research has focused on how information is processed after it is acquired, e.g. in problem solving or 'insight' tasks, but we may also look for species differences in the initial acquisition and coding of information. Here, we show that non-human species have only a limited capacity to discriminate ordered sequences of stimuli. Collating data from 108 experiments on stimulus sequence discrimination (1540 data points from 14 bird and mammal species), we demonstrate pervasive and systematic errors, such as confusing a red-green sequence of lights with green-red and green-green sequences. These errors can persist after thousands of learning trials in tasks that humans learn to near perfection within tens of trials. To elucidate the causes of such poor performance, we formulate and test a mathematical model of non-human sequence discrimination, assuming that animals represent sequences as unstructured collections of memory traces. This representation carries only approximate information about stimulus duration, recency, order and frequency, yet our model predicts non-human performance with a 5.9% mean absolute error across 68 datasets. Because human-level cognition requires more accurate encoding of sequential information than afforded by memory traces, we conclude that improved coding of sequential information is a key cognitive element that may set humans apart from other animals.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.