Successive two-item same-different discrimination and concept learning by pigeons
Section snippets
Experiment 1
The objective of Experiment 1 was to see if pigeons could learn a successive S/D discrimination involving only two alternating stimulus items. We tested four naı̈ve pigeons with either same or different sequences of photographs in a go/no-go task. At the start of the experiment, one of our ancillary objectives was also to develop potential procedures for evaluating “change blindness” (e.g. Rensink et al., 1997) in pigeons. Change blindness is the human failure to detect visual change in a scene
Experiment 2
Experiment 2 looked further into the ISI effects observed in the first experiment. The ISI between the stimuli was systematically varied between 0 and 2 s. If some form of memory for the sequence of items were involved, one should see a gradual and systematic effect of ISI, with performance decreasing with longer “retention intervals” between items.
Experiment 3
The objective of Experiment 3 was to see if the pigeons would transfer the S/D discrimination to novel picture items. Successful transfer would indicate that the discrimination was not stimulus-specific, and suggest instead that it was done by detecting the successive relation between two stimuli. Two transfer tests were conducted. The first examined transfer to color photographs of natural objects and scenes. The second examined transfer to gray-scale photographs of comparable content. All
Experiment 4
The objective of Experiment 4 was to see if the pigeons would transfer their discrimination to video stimuli. These video stimuli allowed us to examine how the pigeons reacted to constantly different and changing stimuli. If they could continue to discriminate them, it would argue against a simple perceptual change hypothesis as the basis for this discrimination, since there would be continuously transforming shape, color, and brightness changes at all times within and between the items of a
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation to R.G. Cook.
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