title: Pigeons' discrimination of Michotte's launching effect.
abstract: We trained four pigeons to discriminate a Michotte launching animation from three other animations using a go/no-go task. The pigeons received food for pecking at one of the animations, but not for pecking at the others. The four animations featured two types of interactions among objects: causal (direct launching) and noncausal (delayed, distal, and distal & delayed). Two pigeons were reinforced for pecking at the causal interaction, but not at the noncausal interactions; two other pigeons were reinforced for pecking at the distal & delayed interaction, but not at the other interactions. Both discriminations proved difficult for the pigeons to master; later tests suggested that the pigeons often learned the discriminations by attending to subtle stimulus properties other than the intended ones.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL 62901-6502, USA. meyoung@siu.edu
authors.forename: Michael E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Young
authors.forename: Joshua S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Beckmann
authors.forename: Edward A
authors.initials: EA
authors.lastname: Wasserman
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001070:Appetitive Behavior; D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D003118:Color Perception; D010856:Columbidae; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D011939:Mental Recall; D009039:Motion Perception; D009042:Motivation; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011340:Problem Solving; D011930:Reaction Time