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I can time with a little help from my friends: effect of social enrichment on timing processes in Pigeons (Columba livia)

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Abstract

There is evidence that impulsive decision-making is associated with errors in timing. However, there has been little attempt to identify the putative mechanism responsible for impulsive animals’ timing errors. One means of manipulating impulsivity in non-human animals is providing different levels of access to conspecifics. These preclinical models have revealed that social isolation increases impulsive responding across a wide range of tasks. The goal of the present study was to determine whether social isolation modulates time perception in pigeons by inducing more variability or a bias to underestimate the passage of time in temporal judgments. A temporal bisection task was used to characterize time perception. One group of pigeons performed the bisection following social enrichment, and the remaining half of the pigeons were tested following social isolation. Results revealed pigeons in the social isolation condition categorized a temporal stimulus sample as “long” at shorter durations than pigeons in the social enrichment condition. These data highlight the mechanism(s) thought to underlie timing-based interventions aimed at reducing impulsivity in humans. Future work should consider whether impulsivity is produced by misperceptions of time or a reduced threshold for a response.

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Notes

  1. Temporal memory was represented as the geometric mean of the end-point stimuli as suggested by some theories of timing (Killeen and Fetterman 1988; Gibbon et al. 1984; Allan and Gibbon 1991). Although there is still some debate on how time is represented psychologically (Trujano and Orduña 2015; Jozefowiez et al. 2009; Yi 2009), the outcome of our statistical tests on parameter estimates did not depend on whether we represented temporal memory as centered on the geometric, arithmetic, or harmonic mean of the end-point stimuli.

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Acknowledgments

The first author is supported by a NIDA T32 DA 035165 postdoctoral fellowship. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors. The experiment complied with the current laws of the USA in which they were performed. We thank Dr. Federico Sanabria for his insights on modeling these data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Jennifer R. Laude

  2. Department of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA

    Jennifer R. Laude

  3. Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Carter W. Daniels

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 40506-0044, USA

    Jordan C. Wade & Thomas R. Zentall

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  1. Jennifer R. Laude
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Correspondence to Thomas R. Zentall.

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All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest. Authors have full control of all primary data and agree to allow the journal to review the data if requested.

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Laude, J.R., Daniels, C.W., Wade, J.C. et al. I can time with a little help from my friends: effect of social enrichment on timing processes in Pigeons (Columba livia). Anim Cogn 19, 1205–1213 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-016-1032-z

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