The simultaneous chain: a new approach to serial learning

Recent advances have allowed the application of behaviorism's rigor to the control of complex cognitive tasks in animals. This article examines recent research on serially organized behavior in animals. ‘Chaining theory’, the traditional approach to the study of such behavior, reduces intelligent action to sequences of discrete stimulus-response units in which each overt response is evoked by a particular stimulus. However, such theories are too weak to explain many forms of serially organized cognition, both in humans and animals. By training non-human primates to produce arbitrary sequences that cannot be learned as chains of particular motor responses, the simultaneous chaining paradigm has overcome limitations of chaining theory in experiments on serial expertise, the use of numerical rules, knowledge of ordinal position, and distance and magnitude effects.