Control of behavior by remote stimuli
Iver Iversen
University of North Florida

Experiments with rats and chimpanzees will illustrate how remote stimuli come to control behavior. Remote stimuli are discriminative stimuli that appear some time prior to the moment the response is to be made (locally remote) or appear in the training history (historically remote). Stimuli can also be remote into the future. The performance under control by remote stimuli may sometimes appear as if no stimuli control the behavior or as if the subject is “very clever” or has an “incredible memory”. Using rats as subjects, the experiments cover delayed stimulus control. Experiments with chimpanzees as subjects establish fingermaze learning with invisible targets and interception tasks with no apparent controlling stimuli. The experiments will be discussed in the context of generating training conditions that can be use to establish desired control by remote stimuli and in the context of preventing inadvertent training histories that may result in development of “inappropriate” behavior under control by (seemingly invisible) remote stimuli.