Stimulus compounding in pigeons

A Test of Three Models for Stimulus Compounding with Children.

Effects of varying stimulus size on object recognition in pigeons.

The authors investigated the pigeon's ability to generalize object discrimination performance to smaller and larger versions of trained objects. In Experiment 1, they taught pigeons with line drawings of multipart objects and later tested the birds with both larger and smaller drawings. The pigeons exhibited significant generalization to new sizes, although they did show systematic performance ...

Suboptimal Choice in Pigeons: Stimulus Value Predicts Choice over Frequencies

Pigeons have shown suboptimal gambling-like behavior when preferring a stimulus that infrequently signals reliable reinforcement over alternatives that provide greater reinforcement overall. As a mechanism for this behavior, recent research proposed that the stimulus value of alternatives with more reliable signals for reinforcement will be preferred relatively independently of their frequencie...

Integrality/separability of stimulus dimensions and multidimensional generalization in pigeons.

The authors present a quantitative framework for interpreting the results of multidimensional stimulus generalization experiments in animals using concepts derived from the geometrical approach to human cognition. The authors apply the model to the analysis of stimulus generalization data obtained from pigeons trained with different sets of stimuli varying along two orthogonal dimensions. Separ...

Stimulus repetition effects on texture-based visual search by pigeons.

Four experiments investigated the effects of within-session stimulus repetition on texture discrimination. Six pigeons (Columba livia) searched for a contrasting target region (color or shape) randomly embedded within a larger distractor region for food reinforcement. Experiment 1 found that repeating features of the distractors, but not those of the target, across trials increased the accuracy...