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Object-specific and relational learning in pigeons

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Abstract

Abstract or relational stimulus processing requires an organism to appreciate the interrelations between or among two or more stimuli (e.g., same or different, less than or greater than). In the current study, we explored the role of concrete and abstract information processing in pigeons performing a visual categorization task which could be solved by attending to either the specific objects presented or the relation among the objects. In Experiment 1, we gave pigeons three training phases in which we gradually increased the variability (that is, the number of object arrays) in the training set. In Experiment 2, we trained a second group of pigeons with an even larger number of object arrays from the outset. We found that, the larger the variability in the training exemplars, the lesser the pigeons’ attention to object-specific information and the greater their attention to relational information; nevertheless, the contribution of object-specific information to categorization performance was never completely eliminated. This pervasive influence of object-specific information is not peculiar to animals, but has been observed in young children and human adults as well.

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Notes

  1. Here and throughout, for the t test comparisons against a hypothesized mean of 50 %, the 95 % CI refers to the 95 % confidence interval of the mean of interest.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Zheng Zhang for his help in conducting this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, The University of Iowa, E11 Seashore Hall, Iowa City, IA, 52242, USA

    Leyre Castro & Edward A. Wasserman

  2. Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology, CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, Fédération de Recherche 3C, 3 Place Victor Hugo, Bât B, Case D, 13331, Marseille Cedex, France

    Joël Fagot & Anaïs Maugard

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  1. Leyre Castro
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  2. Edward A. Wasserman
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  4. Anaïs Maugard
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Correspondence to Leyre Castro or Edward A. Wasserman.

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Castro, L., Wasserman, E.A., Fagot, J. et al. Object-specific and relational learning in pigeons. Anim Cogn 18, 205–218 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-014-0790-8

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