Do pigeons show incidental timing? Some experiments and a suggested hierarchical framework for the study of attention...

Three experiments are reported that examine pigeons' ability to process incidental time cues when time cues are placed in compound with either a visual pattern cue or a spatial position cue. In experiments 1 and 2, it was found that incidental timing suffered relative to timing on control tests in which time-only cues were presented. However, these experiments did not involve explicit training to match duration when the carrier stimulus consisted of a visual pattern or spatial position. When such explicit training was given prior to testing in experiments 3A and 3B, it was found that pigeons matched time sample stimuli equally accurately when duration trials only were given throughout a session or were randomly intermixed with visual pattern or spatial position matching trials. It was concluded that pigeons can process time accurately while simultaneously processing a stimulus from another dimension.