Transfer of pigeons' matching to sample to novel sample locations.
Teach conditional discriminations in several positions so the learner follows the stimulus, not the spot.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Pigeons learned a two-choice matching task.
The sample pictures appeared in several places on the screen.
Researchers then moved the samples to brand-new spots to see if accuracy held.
What they found
The birds kept choosing correctly even when the sample popped up in a never-seen position.
Their choices followed the picture, not the place.
How this fits with other research
Two years earlier the same lab saw the opposite: pigeons failed when samples shifted to side keys (M et al. 1998).
The 1998 birds kept pecking the old spot, giving below-chance errors.
The fix was simple—train the task in many locations from day one.
Lydersen et al. (1974) got a similar boost by adding response-produced cues, showing that extra stimulus control can be engineered.
Why it matters
When you teach conditional discriminations, rotate materials around the table, room, or screen.
A child who sorts red vs blue cards at desk center should also sort them at desk corners, on the floor, and across rooms.
Varied spots keep the stimulus in control, not the geography.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study examined the conditions under which conditional stimulus control by the sample stimuli in three-key matching-to-sample paradigms would generalize across the different possible sample locations. In Experiments 1 and 2, the samples appeared on the left and right side keys during initial training and then on the center key during testing. Transfer of pigeons' matching performances to the center-key samples was evident after both identity and symbolic matching training. In Experiment 3, pigeons trained on symbolic matching with two side-key samples or with a side-key and a center-key sample generally transferred their learned matching performances to those samples when they subsequently appeared in the remaining (novel) location. These results indicate that, when two-choice conditional discriminations are learned with more than one sample location, the visual characteristics of the sample per se predominantly come to control the pigeons' comparison choices. This finding encourages the use of the multiple-location training procedure as a way of reducing control by location, thus providing a more discriminating test of symmetry in animals.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2000 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2000.73-141