CONTEXT SPECIFICITY OF OPERANT DISCRIMINATIVE PERFORMANCE IN PIGEONS: II NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT CONDITIONS

• Published in: Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior Vol. 60; no. 2; pp. 313 - 329
• Main Authors: Thomas, David R., Empedocles, Stephen, Morrison, Spencer K., Bing, Mark Nathaniel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.09.1993; Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior
• Subjects: Animal; Animal behavior; Animal cognition; Biological and medical sciences; Birds; Conditioning; context specificity; contextual stimuli; Cues; discrimination learning; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; generalization testing; key peck; Learning. Memory; odor cues; pigeons; potentiation; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; recency effect; reversal learning; Context; Operant conditioning; Generalization; Pigeon; Vertebrata; Visual stimulus; Acquisition process; Reinforcement contingency; Reversal learning; Animal; Olfaction; Perception; Aves; Stimulus discrimination; Chemical stimulus
• ISSN: 0022-5002; 1938-3711
• DOI: 10.1901/jeab.1993.60-313

Six experiments were performed to explore the necessary and sufficient conditions for producing context specificity of discriminative operant performance in pigeons. In Experiment 1, pigeons learned a successive discrimination (red S+/blue S–) in two chambers that had a particular odor present and between which they were frequently switched. The birds subsequently learned the reversal (blue S+/red S–) in one of these chambers with a different odor present. When switched to the alternative chamber, although the odor and the reinforcement contingency were still appropriate to the reversal, performance appropriate to the original discrimination recurred in subjects for which the houselights were on during training and testing but not for those for which the houselights were off. This indicated the importance of visual contextual cues in producing context specificity. Experiment 2 showed that the frequent switching between boxes in initial training was of no consequence, presumably because the apparatus cues were highly salient to the subjects. Experiment 3 showed significantly less context specificity when odor cues were omitted. Experiment 4 showed that simply using a different reinforced stimulus in each phase of training was ineffective in producing context specificity. Experiment 5 showed that the generalization test procedure used in Experiment 4 was sensitive to context specificity when discrimination‐reversal training was used with different odors in the two training phases. Experiment 6 replicated the results of Experiment 4, but then showed that when different odors accompanied the two training phases, context specificity was obtained with the single‐stimulus paradigm. Thus in both single‐stimulus and discrimination‐reversal paradigms, redundant odor cues potentiated learning about apparatus cues.