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Pigeon reaction time, Hick's law, and intelligence.

C Vickrey1, A Neuringer

  • 1Reed College, Portland, Oregon 97202, USA.

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
|July 26, 2000
PubMed
Summary

Pigeons

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive psychology
  • Animal behavior
  • Psychophysics

Background:

  • Hick's law describes the relationship between the number of choices and reaction time.
  • Previous research has primarily focused on human subjects.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the applicability of Hick's law to pigeons.
  • To examine the effects of training and reinforcement on choice reaction times in pigeons.
  • To compare choice reaction times between pigeons and humans.

Main Methods:

  • Pigeons and humans performed choice reaction time tasks with varying numbers of stimuli.
  • Reaction times were recorded and analyzed as a function of the number of potential target stimuli.
  • Training and differential reinforcement of short reaction times were implemented in some experiments.

Main Results:

  • Pigeons' choice reaction times increased linearly with the number of stimuli, consistent with Hick's law.
  • Training and reinforcement reduced reaction time parameters in pigeons.
  • Pigeons exhibited significantly lower slopes than humans, indicating faster processing per stimulus.

Conclusions:

  • Hick's law generalizes to pigeons, extending its applicability across species.
  • Training and reinforcement learning modulate choice reaction time parameters.
  • The findings challenge Jensen's hypothesis linking Hick function parameters to intelligence.

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