Stimulus salience and asymmetric forgetting in the pigeon

Pigeons were trained using a symbolic delayed matching-to-sample procedure involving bright versus dim houselight samples. We hypothesized that when sample stimuli differ in salience, increasing the size of the retention interval will affect performance on trials initiated by the more salient sample only. In agreement with this prediction, accuracy following the dim sample did not decline as the retention interval increased, whereas accuracy following the bright sample declined to well below 50% correct. In a second experiment, the less salient (dim) sample from Experiment 1 was arranged as the more salient sample in a sample/no-sample procedure. Accuracy on dim sample trials then declined to well below 50% correct as the retention interval increased, whereas accuracy on no-sample trials remained constant. The results suggest that when sample stimuli differ in salience, pigeons may transform the nominal discrimination task into a detection task in which they respond on the basis of the presence or absence of the more salient sample.