ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Superstitious learning of abstract order from random reinforcement.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Human learning of probability distributions is biased toward moderate structural complexity.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Human brains construct individualized global rankings from identical few-shot learning input.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Single-Neuron Encoding of Learnability in the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Prefrontal cortex contribution in transitive inference task through the interplay of beta and gamma oscillations.Communications biology · 2024Article
- The neuropharmacological profile of interval responding during operant tasks.Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archives of pharmacology · 2024Review
- 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
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Humans and other animals often infer spurious associations among unrelated events. However, such superstitious learning is usually accounted for by conditioned associations, raising the question of whether an animal could develop more complex cognitive structures independent of reinforcement. Here, we tasked monkeys with discovering the serial order of two pictorial sets: a "learnable" set in which the stimuli were implicitly ordered and monkeys were rewarded for choosing the higher-rank stimulus and an "unlearnable" set in which stimuli were unordered and feedback was random regardless of the choice. We replicated prior results that monkeys reliably learned the implicit order of the learnable set. Surprisingly, the monkeys behaved as though some ordering also existed in the unlearnable set, showing consistent choice preference that transferred to novel untrained pairs in this set, even under a preference-discouraging reward schedule that gave rewards more frequently to the stimulus that was selected less often. In simulations, a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm (
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