The effect of filled and empty intervals on clock and memory processes in pigeons

According to the mixed memory model (Penney, Gibbon, & Meck, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 26, 1770-1787, 2000), different clock rates for stimuli with different nontemporal properties must be stored within a single reference memory distribution in order to detect a difference between the clock rates of the different signals. In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained in a between-subjects design to discriminate empty intervals (bound by two 1-s visual markers) and filled intervals (a continuous visual signal). The intervals were signaled by different visual stimuli, and they required responses to different sets of comparison stimuli. Empty intervals were judged as being longer than filled intervals. The difference between the point of subjective equality (PSE) for the empty intervals and the PSE for the filled intervals increased proportionally as the magnitudes of the anchor duration pairs were increased from 2 and 8 s to 4 and 16 s. In Experiment 2, the pigeons were trained to discriminate intervals signaled by the absence of houselight illumination (Group Empty) or the presence of houselight illumination (Group Filled). The psychophysical timing functions for these intervals were identical to each other. The results of Experiment 1 indicate that memory mixing is not necessary for detecting a timing difference between empty and filled intervals in pigeons. The results of Experiment 2 suggest that the nature of the stimuli that signal the empty and filled intervals impacts how pigeons judge the durations of empty and filled intervals.