Remembering in California sea lions: Using priming cues to facilitate language-like performance

Two sea lions(Zalophus californianus) were trained to respond to relational commands fey bringing the last designated object (transport item, or TI) to the earlier designated object (goal item, or GI). Most errors on this task involved forgetting of the GI due to interference from memory for the TI. We reasoned that instructing the animals to act directly on the same object several times in single-object commands immediately before a relational command that included the same object as the GI should make the GI associative episode less prone to interference by the TI associative episode. Results confirmed that prior cuing or prompting in this manner did enable the sea lions to perform significantly better on relational commands when no cuing was given.