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A Method for Investigating Change Blindness in Pigeons Columba Livia

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Published on: September 7, 2018

Midsession reversal learning: Pigeons learn what stimulus to avoid.

Thomas R Zentall¹, Megan Halloran¹, Daniel Peng¹

¹Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky.

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Animal Learning and Cognition

|March 28, 2020

Summary

Pigeons trained on a midsession reversal task made fewer errors when the number of stimuli to avoid (S1) increased. This suggests pigeons learn to avoid stimuli rather than choose correct ones in this task.

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Area of Science:

Behavioral psychology
Animal cognition

Background:

The midsession reversal task involves discrimination learning with changing contingencies.
Pigeons often exhibit anticipatory and perseverative errors in this task despite training.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how altering the number of stimuli to avoid (S1) affects error rates in pigeons.
To explore pigeons' learning strategies in the midsession reversal task.

Main Methods:

Pigeons were trained on a simultaneous discrimination task with a midsession reversal.
The number of S1 stimuli was systematically increased over trials.
Anticipatory and perseverative errors were recorded and analyzed.

Main Results:

Increasing the number of S1 stimuli led to a significant increase in perseverative errors.
Anticipatory error rates remained unchanged with the increased number of S1 stimuli.
Previous research showed increasing S2 stimuli increased anticipatory errors but not perseverative errors.

Conclusions:

Pigeons may learn the midsession reversal task by identifying stimuli to avoid, rather than stimuli to choose.
Attentional shifts towards variable stimuli during incorrect trials could also explain the observed error patterns.