2026/06/22 by Stefano Ghirlanda, Janelle Mendoza · 1 voice
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Associative learning #Associative property #Child and Animal Learning Development #Cognition #Content-addressable memory #Memory and Neural Mechanisms #Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs #Perception #Statistical learning
paper · doi:10.1037/rev0000626
published in Psychological Review (American Psychological Association)
openalex publication_date 2026/06/22 · openalex created_date 2026/06/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
We review 58 experiments about "intuitive statistics" in mammals and birds, which investigate the animals' ability to make productive decisions when actions have probabilistic outcomes. We show that a stimulus-response associative model closely mirrors the animals' choices. The model reproduces qualitatively all results, and it accounts for an average 88% of the variance in 10 quantitative fits to data from 37 experiments with birds and mammals. The unexplained variance does not indicate processes more sophisticated than stimulus-response learning, as it either lies within measurement error or derives from animals making more mistakes than the stimulus-response model. These results confirm that associative learning models are a powerful tool in animal cognition research, often capable of unmatched quantitative accuracy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).