What is the difference between prospective and retrospective coding supposed to be?
IA PROspective means roughly “looking forward” ,i.e. the animal codes memory of the sample stimulus in terms of what it is going to have to do on the test, like “peck red”. The opposite is RETROspective, or “looking backward”. In that case, the stimulus is coded in terms of its own properties, like it was red, or green, or whatever. So the point of the experimentis that if the animal had a prospective code, then making the things it could choose between in the test more alike would make performance worse. “peck orange” and “peck red” for instance would be more easily confused then “peck red” and “peck green” Q. I don’t really understand the concept of “symbolic distance effect” > explained in the textbook. A. It’s as if the set of items was represented along a line (A-B-C-D- etc,). The if the animal is shown 2 of these items and is supposed to respond first to the one that comes first in the series, it’s easier to make that decision when they are widely separated (like B-D) than when t
