The extraction of abstract rules and their generalization to new items has been proposed to be at the heart of higher cognitive functions such as language. Research with animals has shown that various species can extract rather complex patterns from the input, as well as establish abstract same/different relations. However, much of these findings have been observed after extensive training procedures. Here, we tested rats' capacity to discriminate and generalize tone triplets that entailed a repetition from triplets that followed an ordinal, non-repeating pattern following a relatively short discrimination training procedure in a water T-maze. Our findings demonstrate that, under this procedure and after only 12 sessions, rats can learn to discriminate both patterns when a reliable difference in pitch variations is present across them (Experiment 1). When differences in pitch are eliminated (Experiment 2), no discrimination between patterns is found. Results suggest a procedure based on a water T-maze might be used to explore discrimination of acoustic patterns in rodents.

Two experiments examined the influence of verb tense on how abstractly people construe action representations. Experiment 1 revealed that written descriptions of several daily events using the simple past tense (vs. simple present tense) resulted in actions and the action's target being seen as less likely and less familiar, respectively. In Experiment 2 participants wrote about a personal episode of binge drinking (using the simple past tense vs. simple present tense), and the resulting narratives were coded using the Linguistic Category Model (see Semin & Fiedler, 1991). Results revealed that events were described at a more abstract level when texts were written using the simple past tense (vs. simple present tense). The results are discussed in the context of other effects of verb form and in relation to construal level of events.