The ability to learn spatiotemporal characteristics of biologically significant
events is advantageous for an animal and is known as time-place learning (TPL).
Gallistel (1990) proposed an influential theory positing that whenever a biologically
significant event occurred, a memory code was automatically formed, encoding the
nature of the event, and the time and place in which it occurred. When the animal is later
faced with a biological need it could consult these memory codes and determine when
and where that need had been met in the past. This information could be used to guide
current behaviour. Importantly, Gallistel theorized that the encoding of the
spatiotemporal characteristics of an event into a tripartite code was an automatic process.
Despite the appealing power and simplicity of Gallistel's theory, I have provided
arguments suggesting that it has serious limitations. Perhaps the most damaging evidence
against this theory is the reluctance of rats to demonstrate daily TPL (i.e., events that vary
in location depending on time of day). Widman, Gordon, and Timberlake (2000) argue
that for TPL to occur the response cost for incorrect decisions must be high. While this
hypothesis is unable to explain the inconsistencies in TPL, it does highlight the fact that
animals do not automatically store time-place-event information as a tripartite code. If
they did, it would not make sense for them to ignore such information in some tasks.
I have provided an alternative hypothesis that states that whenever a biologically
significant event occurs two bipartite memory codes (time-event and place-event) are
automatically formed. Only under some conditions, perhaps those with high response
cost, do animals form tripartite codes. For this reason, rats often have difficulty learning a
TPL task; although rats easily learn a place preference for those places that provide
reinforcement (place-event), and easily learn a go/no-go discrimination (time-event). This
thesis provides data from both the daily and interval TPL realms supporting the proposed
theory of bipartite codes.
Although rats do not readily learn daily TPL tasks, they do demonstrate
knowledge of interval TPL under a variety of conditions designed to enhance the
ecological validity of the task. The properties of interval TPL are discussed. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/16966 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Thorpe, Christina Marie |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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