Picture fragment completion: priming in the pigeon.
It has been suggested that the system behind implicit memory in humans is evolutionarily old and that animals should readily show priming. In Experiment 1, a picture fragment completion test was used to test priming in pigeons. After pecking a warning stimulus, pigeons were shown 2 partially obscured pictures from different categories and were always reinforced for choosing a picture from one of the categories. On control trials, the warning stimulus was a picture of some object (not from the S+ or S- category), on study trials the warning stimulus was a picture to be categorized on the next trial, and on test trials the warning stimulus was a randomly chosen picture and the S+ picture was the warning stimulus seen on the previous trial. Categorization was better on study and test trials than on control trials. Experiment 2 ruled out the possibility that the priming effect was caused by the pigeons' responding to familiarity by using warning stimuli from both S+ and S- categories. Experiment 3 investigated the time course of the priming effect.
Brodbeck
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Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. brodbeck@thunderbird.auc.laurentian.ca
D000818:Animals; D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D010856:Columbidae; D011939:Mental Recall; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011340:Problem Solving