動物の計時行動研究の成果と課題(心・行動・時間,第25回大会 シンポジウム1)

抄録

Studies on animal timing have developed nonverbal experimental procedures and have shown that animal participants in research can learn to time intervals of arbitrary duration. Under immediate timing procedures, such as a fixed-interval schedule and a peak procedure, animals wait a fixed proportion of an interval before starting to respond. Under a retrospective timing procedure, animals can discriminate between a short and a long interval; the bisection point is approximately at the geometric mean of the two intervals. Furthermore, behavioral measures of timing in both kinds of the procedures have a scalar property, which indicates that animal timing conforms to Weber's law. Theories of animal timing have successfully explained these phenomena. However, issues, such as credit-assignment problems, animals' temporal tracking, and animals' "episodic-like" memory, remain and call for further empirical and theoretical exploration.