A critique of Nakagawa’s (1993) “Relational rule learning in the rat”

Abstract

Nakagawa (1993) concluded that rats can use abstract concepts and relational rules. This was based on contrasting performances of two groups of rats in tasks where it was assumed that the controlling features of the stimuli were black visual patterns on white cards. However, the good performances can be explained by the rats’ use of brightness cues with reinforcement contingencies that were consistent throughout pretraining and transfer training. The bad performances can be explained by the rats’ use of brightness cues with unsignaled changes in reinforcement contingencies. © 1994, Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.