Experience-dependent emergence of a grouping bias.

ABSTRACT: Humans share with non-human animals perceptual biases that might form the basis of complex cognitive abilities. One example comes from the principles described by the iambic-trochaic law (ITL). According to the ITL, sequences of sounds varying in duration are grouped as iambs, whereas sequences varying in intensity are grouped as trochees. These grouping biases have gained much attention because they might help pre-lexical infants bootstrap syntactic parameters (such as word order) in their language. Here, we explore how experience triggers the emergence of perceptual grouping biases in a non-human species. We familiarized rats with either long-short or short-long tone pairs. We then trained the animals to discriminate between sequences of alternating and randomly ordered tones. Results sh

SUBMITTER: Toro JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4614421 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature