Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 7, 2026

A Method for Investigating Change Blindness in Pigeons (Columba Livia)
Published on: September 7, 2018
Conditioning of two-response patterns of key pecking in pigeons
Abstract:
On discrete trials, two response keys were made available to hungry pigeons and food reinforcement depended on the order in which the required two key pecks occurred. In different phases, only one of the four possible two-peck sequences (left-left, left-right, right-left, and right-right) produced food reinforcement. In each case, the pigeons learned to perform the correct two-peck sequence more often than the incorrect sequences. Furthermore, the course of differentiation mastery indicated that both reinforcement history and response-reinforcer contiguity influenced performance. These results reveal that response patterns comprising two instances of the same response left-left and right-right) or instances of two different responses (left-right and right-left) may function as operants, thereby extending the generality of conditioning principles from discrete responses to structured sequences of behavior. These and other results are discussed in terms of contiguity-based and memory-based models of learning.
Related Concept Videos
Law of Effect
Edward Thorndike's foundational work involved studying learning in animals, particularly using puzzle boxes...
Principles of Classical Conditioning
During the...
Classical Conditioning
Ivan Pavlov observed that dogs salivated...
Real-World Application of Classical Conditioning
Higher-order, or second-order, conditioning occurs when a neutral stimulus becomes associated with an already established conditioned stimulus through repeated pairings. For instance, if a dog has been...

