This means that the relationship between the processes of learning at short timescales and cultural inheritance are not well understood.
It is the process of learning at short timescales among contemporaries that gives rise to cultural inheritance over long time scales of many generations (i.e., among individuals that could never meet).
Our results indicate that understanding the dynamics of learning processes on short timescales may be central to understanding the ecology of cultural inheritance (also recognized by Giraldeau et al. 1994; Danchin et al. 2004).
The facilitation of performance could manifest in (i) an increase to the total amount of learning achieved, such that a higher performance level is reached, or (ii) an increased rate at which learning is achieved, such that the same maximum performance is ultimately achieved as with standard therapy alone but over a different timescale, i.e., with less hours of behavioural therapy.
(B ) Schematic diagram of synaptic and behavioral timescales in reward learning.
By contrast, environmental novelty signals appear to attenuate only over the slower timescale of sessions, perhaps indicating that learning environmental layout is a slower process than some of the short-term effects of object novelty.
Importantly, these relatively fast timescales match the temporal learning windows of neurons (<50 ms) [56], and hence, may render spike-timing dependent synaptic plasticity operant for learning informative activation patterns.
This rapidly decaying amygdala activation might reflect a temporary novelty-related increase in salience as opposed to our novelty responses over the longer timescale of trials, which we tentatively related to learning.
In fact, the integration of learning on short and long timescales generates cumulative cultural improvement in diet.
In this context, an outstanding puzzle is further elaborating the systematic relation between low-level, short-timescale characteristics of movement and high-level, longer-timescale processes, such as learning.
