Yet Miller insists that the real impediments to solving discrimination, at least in this case, are "certain feminists, Germaine Greer and whoever it might be".
Thus, it was possible to overcome the limitation of probing rat invariant recognition with simultaneously presented shapes, which makes it extremely challenging to prevent rats from solving discrimination tasks using lower-level visual features (see discussion in Section 3.3.1 and below).
Court cases in Texas, Colorado and Maryland have found against affirmative action; and opinion polls consistently show that a majority of Americans, regardless of race or sex, do not believe in what one columnist calls "discrimination to solve discrimination".
But Goodell's deduction is flawed, for if education and training solved discrimination we surely would have educated and trained our way beyond it by now.
Two associative accounts are suggested as possible mechanisms for solving the discrimination.
Recent studies on bumblebee and honeybee color and pattern learning [14] [15], [28] have introduced a new view of visual learning by free-flying bees, by showing that what the insects learn and discriminate in a given visual task depends on the training procedure which may or not inculcate the use of specific cues for solving a discrimination problem.
Following training, the RScomb and Sham1 rats were given a probe test in the dark, with light levels below 1 lux, to determine whether visual cues were critical for solving the discrimination.
As direction of travel was irrelevant to solving this discrimination (see Figure 1A), the task assessed the use of distal visual cues in the absence of any obvious navigational component.
The lack of effect of hippocampal lesions on solving the discrimination with novel combinations of rewarded and nonrewarded stimuli is consistent with other findings suggesting that approach and response behavior is guided by simple associations formed between stimuli and an outcome (Deacon and Rawlins, 1996; Driscoll et al., 2004).
The location task contained no navigational component and there was no requirement for the animal to monitor where it had traveled within any given trial, as the task was explicitly designed so that direction of travel within the test room was irrelevant to solving the discrimination.
To identify the role played by the hippocampus in solving configural discriminations we, therefore, examined how lesions in this region affect: discriminations between different media, discriminations based on distal spatial cues, and biconditional discriminations based on local or distal cues.
