Abstract
Pigeons learned to peck a key when it was illuminated during a 2-sec trial. A white-noise ready signal preceded the onset of the light; a response terminated the trial and occasionally produced reinforcement. For every trial, reaction time was recorded as the temporal interval between light onset and keypeck response. The initial experiment used “white” light; subsequent experiments used monochromatic lights of 525 and 625 nm. Within each session, the luminance of the light stimulus varied randomly over a three-log-unit range. For white light, overlapping ranges were used to extend the total luminance variation to six log units. Resulting reaction-time/luminance functions for white light were decreasing over most of the range. However, a rise in reaction time with increasing luminance was seen in the midluminance region and again at very high values. At 625 nm, the function decreased rapidly at low luminances and then leveled off or rose; at 525 nm, it was relatively flat at low luminances, where reaction times were lower than they were to photopically matched 625-nm values. Sensory and nonsensory factors might contribute to the shapes of these functions, which may be too complex to be used for psychophysical scaling.
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This research was supported by Grant 02456 from the United States Public Health Service.
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Blough, P.M., Blough, D.S. The reaction-time/luminance relationship for pigeons to lights of different spectral compositions. Perception & Psychophysics 23, 468–474 (1978). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03199521
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03199521