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A Method for Investigating Change Blindness in Pigeons (Columba Livia)

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Testing pigeon memory in a change detection task.

Anthony A Wright¹, Jeffrey S Katz, John Magnotti

¹Department of Neurobiologyand Anatomy, University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, Texas 77225, USA. anthony.a.wright@uth.tmc.edu

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

|April 13, 2010

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Pigeons learned a generalized color change detection task, demonstrating memory-based processing. This research enables direct cross-species comparisons of short-term memory.

Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Animal Behavior
Comparative Cognition

Background:

Change detection tasks are vital for understanding human short-term memory.
Previous research has not directly compared animal and human memory processing using identical tasks.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate pigeons' ability to learn and generalize a change detection task.
To determine if pigeons' performance relies on memory rather than perceptual capture.
To establish a foundation for cross-species memory comparisons.

Main Methods:

Six pigeons were trained on a change detection task involving colored circles.
Performance was tested with novel colors and extended delays.
The task mirrored human short-term memory paradigms.

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T-maze Forced Alternation and Left-right Discrimination Tasks for Assessing Working and Reference Memory in Mice

T-maze Forced Alternation and Left-right Discrimination Tasks for Assessing Working and Reference Memory in Mice

Published on: February 26, 2012

Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: Jun 14, 2026

A Method for Investigating Change Blindness in Pigeons (Columba Livia)

A Method for Investigating Change Blindness in Pigeons (Columba Livia)

Published on: September 7, 2018

Recording Single Neurons' Action Potentials from Freely Moving Pigeons Across Three Stages of Learning

Recording Single Neurons' Action Potentials from Freely Moving Pigeons Across Three Stages of Learning

Published on: June 2, 2014

T-maze Forced Alternation and Left-right Discrimination Tasks for Assessing Working and Reference Memory in Mice

T-maze Forced Alternation and Left-right Discrimination Tasks for Assessing Working and Reference Memory in Mice

Published on: February 26, 2012

Main Results:

Pigeons successfully learned to identify the changed color.
Performance generalized to unfamiliar colors, indicating a learned concept of change.
Pigeons maintained accuracy with delays significantly longer than training, suggesting memory-based processing.

Conclusions:

Pigeons exhibit a generalized concept of color change detection.
Their performance indicates memory-based, not solely perceptual, processing.
This study provides a novel paradigm for direct cross-species memory research.