title: Absolute pitch: frequency-range discriminations in pigeons (Columba livia): comparisons with zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) and humans (Homo sapiens).
abstract: Absolute pitch (AP) is the ability to classify individual pitches without an external referent. The authors compared results from pigeons (Columba livia, a nonsongbird species) with results (R. Weisman, M. Njegovan, C. Sturdy, L. Phillmore, J. Coyle, & D. Mewhort, 1998) from zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata, a songbird species) and humans (Homo sapiens) in AP tests that required classification of contiguous tones into 3 or 8 frequency ranges on the basis of correlations between the tones in each frequency range and reward. Pigeons' 3-range discriminations were similar in accuracy to those of zebra finches and humans. In the more challenging 8-range task, pigeons, like zebra finches, discriminated shifts from reward to nonreward from range to range across all 8 ranges, whereas humans discriminated only the 1st and last ranges. Taken together with previous research, the present experiments suggest that birds may have more accurate AP than mammals.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky, KY, USA.
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Friedrich
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Zentall
authors.forename: Ronald
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Weisman
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000818:Animals; D010856:Columbidae; D005260:Female; D046369:Finches; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013045:Species Specificity