Not So Bird-Brained: Pigeons Show What-Where-When Memory Both as Time of Day and How Long Ago

In an ever-changing world, the ability to track what significant events occur and where and when is beneficial to a variety of animal species. The purpose of the present studies was to assess the presence of this ability to track what-where-when memory in pigeons based both on when during the day th...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Animal behavior processes 2014-04, Vol.40 (2), p.225-240
Main Authors: Meyers-Manor, Julia E., Overmier, J. Bruce, Hatfield, Daniel W., Croswell, Jo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis of Variance
Animal
Animal cognition
Animal memory
Animal Models
Animals
Brain - physiology
Choice Behavior - physiology
Columbidae - physiology
Conditioning, Classical
Conditioning, Operant - physiology
Discrimination Learning - physiology
Episodic Memory
Experimental psychology
Feeding Behavior
Memory
Memory - physiology
Pigeons
Reinforcement Schedule
Reward
Time Factors
Time Perception
Transfer (Psychology)
Wildfowl
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In an ever-changing world, the ability to track what significant events occur and where and when is beneficial to a variety of animal species. The purpose of the present studies was to assess the presence of this ability to track what-where-when memory in pigeons based both on when during the day the events occurred and how long ago events occurred. In these studies, pigeons were trained to discriminate between two foods that differed in quality (what), making one more "attractive" than the other. The birds were required to alter their choice of keylights (where) to get these differential foods based on the time of day (Experiments 1-2) or how long ago (Experiments 3-5) they were in a session (when). Pigeons were able to correctly choose the key that yielded the "attractive" food using both time of day and how long ago, indicating a what-where-when memory. However, the pigeons failed to transfer this knowledge to a novel situation, showing limited flexibility in use of the learned what-where-when information. These findings suggest that pigeons have abilities to track what-where-when events as do caching birds and other animal species, but perhaps represented in a more rigid manner.
ISSN:2329-8456
2329-8464
DOI:10.1037/xan0000016