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Pigeons (Columba livia) show change blindness in a color-change detection task

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Abstract

Change blindness is a phenomenon whereby changes to a stimulus are more likely go unnoticed under certain circumstances. Pigeons learned a change detection task, in which they observed sequential stimulus displays consisting of individual colors back-projected onto three response keys. The color of one response key changed during each sequence and pecks to the key that displayed the change were reinforced. Pigeons showed a change blindness effect, in that change detection accuracy was worse when there was an inter-stimulus interval interrupting the transition between consecutive stimulus displays. Birds successfully transferred to stimulus displays involving novel colors, indicating that pigeons learned a general change detection rule. Furthermore, analysis of responses to specific color combinations showed that pigeons could detect changes involving both spectral and non-spectral colors and that accuracy was better for changes involving greater differences in wavelength. These results build upon previous investigations of change blindness in both humans and pigeons and suggest that change blindness may be a general consequence of selective visual attention relevant to multiple species and stimulus dimensions.

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Notes

  1. FWHM, full width at half maximum, is a measure of spectral bandwidth. It is the difference between the two most extreme wavelengths at which intensity drops to half the of the peak wavelength.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Brett Lambert, Lyla Wadia, and Tara Mah for helping train birds and collect preliminary data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Whitman College, 345 Boyer Ave, Walla Walla, WA, 99362, USA

    Walter T. Herbranson & Jacob S. Jeffers

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  1. Walter T. Herbranson
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  2. Jacob S. Jeffers
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Correspondence to Walter T. Herbranson.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures were in accordance with the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare and with US Public Health Service Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. The experiments reported were approved by Whitman College’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

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Herbranson, W.T., Jeffers, J.S. Pigeons (Columba livia) show change blindness in a color-change detection task. Anim Cogn 20, 725–737 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-017-1094-6

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