Can Ants Apply What They Acquired Through Operant Conditioning?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Can an act learned through conditioning be adequately presented in a subsequent different situation under which it may be useful to the individuals? We approached this question, working on ants, and staying at a level basic compared to the largely developed Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) discipline. We simply conditioned the ants of both colonies A and B to a green hollow cube (= the conditioned stimulus CS1) associated with sugar water (= the unconditioned stimulus US1), and to basilica (= the conditioned stimulus CS2) associated with meat (= the unconditioned stimulus US2). We then deprived colony A of sugar water and colony B of meat. Thereafter, when confronted to the two conditioned stimuli at the same time, the ants of colony A chose CS 1 (previously associated with sugar water), and the ants of colony B chose the CS 2 (previously associated with meat). The ants chose thus the CS corresponding to the US of which they were deprived. They applied thus a behavior learned through conditioning in a subsequent situation under which this behavior may be useful. During our test experiment, the ants strongly responded to the adequate CS due to their high motivation resulting from starvation. Conditioning techniques might also be usefully used during humans’ treatment under the ABA discipline. Increasing the patients’ motivation during some conditioning performed for caring them may enhance the impact of that conditioning on the treatment efficiency.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".