Abstract
Rats have been reported to choose B among BD pair after being trained with four pairs of olfactory discrimination in a five-item series (A+B-, B+C-, C+D-, D+E-). The present research examined rats in a similar transitive inference task with visual stimuli. Rats trained in the Upward order (D+E-, C+D…: group Upward) demonstrated transitive responding, but rats trained in the Downward order (i. e., A+B-, then B+C-…: group Downward) did not. However, after retraining of the four original pairs of stimuli, both groups showed transitive responding. These results suggest that the ability to solve transitive inference tasks is not limited to the olfactory sensory domain in rats.
