Toro, J. M.
Animals have remarkable abilities to track regularities in their environment and several experiments have demonstrated they can extract statistical and structural information from sound sequences. Research now is trying to identify the constraints that might guide non-human animals in this process. Here I will present a set of experiments in the music domain that demonstrate contrasts between human and non-human animals in the way they might benefit from cues present in the signal. We ran experiments on rule learning over consonant and dissonant chords with rats (a species that, under controlled lab conditions, does not have extensive experience with harmonic stimuli) and human participants. Results show differences across species regarding the extent to which they benefit from differences in consonance. Animals learn rules with the same ease independently of whether they are implemented over consonant intervals, dissonant intervals, or over a combination of them. Humans, on the contrary, learn an abstract rule better when it is implemented over consonant than over dissonant intervals. Results suggest that humans, but not other animals, benefit from a processing advantage for consonant sounds. The present results complement studies with human infants suggesting that familiarity plays a key role during the extraction of regularities in non-human animals.