p.47 animal behavior is dependent on rich sets of cue information
during early performance of novel tasks and with overtraining this behavior becomes dependent on an increasingly
smaller and more specific set cue information.
p.47-48 In his original formulation of cognitive maps, Tolman (1948) discussed
five basic experiments and their implications to develop his perspectives on cognition:
Latent learning: Learning can occur without observable
changes in behavioral performance. This form of learning can be accomplished with a completely random, largely unmotivated
exploration.
Vicarious trial and error: Learning occurs through
active investigation. Vicarious trial and error represents active investigation of the bounds of the signaling stimulus or
specific signaled contingencies.
Searching for the stimulus: Learning occurs through
active investigation by the animal. Highly salient outcomes yield a search for an environmental change that caused the outcome.
Hypotheses: Development of expectancies require testing
and outcome stability. Hypothesis behavior is based on the ordered use of a previous set of behavioral expectancies - that
some given change in behavior should produce a change in environmental outcome.
Spatial orientation or short-cut behavior: Behavioral
inference is represented by the efficient use of hypothesis behavior in a novel circumstance.
p.51 In their paper on The organism and the causal texture of the
environment, Tolman and
Brunswik (1935) provide an objective definition for hypothesis behavior: the appearance of systematic rather than
chance distributions of behavior.
p.58 Following Tolman and Brunswik (1935) and Tolman (1948, 1949), we argue
that animals learn the causal texture of the environment and this leads to the formation of cognitive maps and higher
order cognitive structure (that provide principles for switching cognitive maps).
p.61 The vast majority of Tolman’s experiments on animal cognition
were focused on understanding inference or, in Tolman’s words, the animal’s sign-gestalt expectancy.
In contrast to the experiments of Hull and his contemporaries, Tolman’s experiments examined animal behavior during
early learning regimes when animals have relatively little (or sparse) experience.
