Intrusion of stereotyped responding in pigeon spatial memory tasks

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Animal behavior
• Avian cognition

Background:

• Pigeons (Columba livia) are often used as models for studying memory and learning.
• Spatial memory tasks are crucial for understanding how animals navigate and remember locations.
• Simultaneous item presentation in memory tasks can elicit unique response strategies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate serial position effects (primacy and recency) in pigeon spatial memory.
• To develop and assess a radial-arm maze analog for pigeons.
• To identify and characterize stereotyped response patterns in pigeons during spatial memory tasks.

Main Methods:

• Delayed matching of key location task (Experiment 1).
• Development of a keypack analog of the radial-arm maze task (Experiment 4).
• Controlled experiments to isolate stereotyped responding (Experiments 2 and 3).

Main Results:

• Pigeons showed above-chance accuracy for the first peck, near-chance for the second, and below-chance for the third in a spatial memory task.
• Stereotyped responding, termed "superstitious" behavior, was identified when pigeons repeatedly pecked keys in the same sequence.
• Pigeons successfully avoided previously pecked keys but employed a fixed sequence strategy.

Conclusions:

• Pigeons demonstrate a strong predisposition for stereotyped responding in multi-item spatial memory tasks.
• This stereotyped behavior can confound the interpretation of memory effects like primacy and recency.
• Future spatial memory research with pigeons should account for and potentially control for these fixed response patterns.