Four-month-old infants extract ordinal information in number-based and size-based visual sequences, provided that magnitude changes involve increasing relations. Here the ontogenetic origins of ordinal processing were investigated between 2018 and 2022 by testing newborns' discrimination of reversal in numerosity (Experiment 1, N = 22 White, 11…

Sequence learning is fundamental to a wide range of cognitive functions. Explaining how sequences--and the relations between the elements they comprise--are learned is a fundamental challenge to cognitive science. However, although hundreds of articles addressing this question are published each year, the actual learning mechanisms involved in the…

Nonhuman animals, like humans, appear sensitive to the structure of the elements of sequences, perhaps even when the structure relates nonadjacent elements. In the present study, we examined the contribution of chunking, rule learning, and item memory when rats learned serial patterns composed of two interleaved subpatterns. In one group, the…