Context specificity of operant discriminative performance in pigeons: II. Necessary and sufficient conditions.
Use two clear context cues together to keep a new skill tied to the right place.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with pigeons in a lab. They wanted to know what makes a bird use the right cue in the right place.
They added two kinds of context cues. One cue was a smell that filled the chamber. The other cue was the look of the box itself.
Then they tested if the birds could flip their choices when the rules changed. They ran this test in two set-ups: single-stimulus and reversal.
What they found
When both the smell and the box look were there, the birds kept the new rule only in that box. They did not use the rule in a new box.
The combo of smell plus box look worked every time. Either cue alone did not work as well.
How this fits with other research
This study builds on Ferrari et al. (1991). That paper said the room itself was the key. The new work shows you need both the room and the extra smell.
Storch et al. (2012) took the idea further. They found that training in a new room first helps later extinction stick. Both papers show that place matters for what the bird learns.
Shull (1971) mixed sights and sounds. The new paper mixes smells and sights. Both show that more than one sense at once gives stronger control.
Why it matters
When you teach a child to use a picture card only in the lunch room, add a clear extra cue. A scent, a seat color, or a sound can lock the skill to that place. This cuts down on errors when the child moves to a new room.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
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.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1993 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1993.60-313