Pigeons make errors as a result of interval timing in a visual, but not a visual-spatial, midsession reversal task.

Abstract

It has been shown previously that pigeons make surprising errors on a visually based midsession reversal task (Cook & Rosen, 2010; Rayburn-Reeves, Molet, & Zentall, 2011). We trained birds with red and green sidekeys, with one color rewarded in the first 40 trials (S1) and the other color rewarded in the latter 40 trials (S2). Importantly, in Phases 1 and 3, red and green were always presented on the same side, whereas in Phase 2 sidekeys were presented on the left and right equally often. In Phases 2 and 3, probe sessions with intertrial intervals (ITIs) longer or shorter than the training intertribal interval (ITI) were interjected among baseline sessions. Results showed that pigeons presented with visual-only cues used interval duration since the beginning of the session to predict when the reversal of reward contingency would occur, but pigeons presented with color and spatial dimensions confounded for predicting reward tended to use a more optimal reward-following strategy of choice based on local reinforcement.