Department of Psychology University of Georgia Athens, Georgia 30602

Summary

Within the last few years an interest has developed in the learning and discriminative behavior of the opossum. It was assumed that an animal with such a primitive brain would not be very successful in the learning procedures used with the rat and other animals. The present summary indicates the opossum has been studied in many different situations used on other animals. The list includes conditioning, different types of maze learning, color and object discrimination, operant conditioning, and other behaviors. The surprising result is that the opossum is highly successful in all types of learning situations. It was not expected to be as successful in discrimination as animals with a larger brain, but it was on a par as far as learning was concerned. The only type of problem it failed completely was the double alternation one, which few animals can solve.