Abstract
With a three-choice instrumental discrimination procedure, pigeons were taught to distinguish small spherical objects from nonspherical objects. Spherical objects were defined as positive, nonspherical objects as negative. A device allowing an automatic presentation of the stimuli was employed. The subjects actually pecked the objects, and grain rewards were presented directly beside the correct objects. Acquisition was rapid, with the birds reaching a criterion of 80% correct choices within less than 150 trials. There was evidence that more than 200 objects were remembered individually over 3 months. Pigeons transferred the discrimination of spherical/nonspherical objects to novel objects. The criteria by which the birds judged the sphericity of objects seemed to be similar to those applied by humans. They could apply the categorization in a relational manner and generalize it to apply to photographs and drawings of objects. The categorization competence was retained for at least 3 months.
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This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. I thank H. Heinig and W. Longerich for excellent mechanical workmanship, F. Bohle for the development of the electronics, S. Kesch for animal care, G. Keim for photography, L. Zimmermann for artwork, and A. Lohmann and A. Niemuth for essential assistance with the preparation of the manuscript. I am grateful to J. Emmerton, S. E. G. Lea, and M. Rilling for reading a draft and making useful suggestions. S. E. G. Lea also devised and tabulated a special statistical test. The work was partly carried out while the author was still at the Psychologisches Institut, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
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Delius, J.D. Categorical discrimination of objects and pictures by pigeons. Animal Learning & Behavior 20, 301–311 (1992). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213385
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213385