Abstract
Pigeons were trained to recall an arbitrary sequence on a delayed matching-to-successive-samples (DMTSS) task. Sample items were presented successively and then displayed simultaneously. Subjects were required to respond to them in the order in which they appeared. In Experiment 1, pigeons responded correctly on 75% of the trials on a two-item DMTSS task but at a chance level of accuracy on a three-item task. In Experiment 2, pigeons who learned to produce a three-item sequence prior to DMTSS training mastered a three-item DMTSS task at a 75% level of accuracy. Control groups, trained initially with the same items on nonserial tasks, performed as poorly on a three-item DMTSS task as the naive subjects of Experiment 1. It was hypothesized that pigeons that first learned to produce a three-item list were able to recall three-item samples in DMTSS because they had learned to represent three-item sequences.
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This research was supported in part by a grant from NIMH (MH-40462). We thank R. Schusterman for helpful comments about an earlier draft of this article.
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Terrace, H.S., Chen, S. & Jaswal, V. Recall of three-item sequences by pigeons. Animal Learning & Behavior 24, 193–205 (1996). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198967
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198967