title: Flexible learning and use of multiple-landmark information by pigeons (Columba livia) in a touch screen-based goal searching task.
abstract: Three touch screen-based experiments were conducted to investigate whether pigeons would learn to use configural information about a goal's location in relation to a multiple-landmark array. In Experiment 1, 4 pigeons (Columba livia) were trained to peck a computer monitor at a location that constituted the third vertex of a hypothetical triangle defined by 2 different landmarks. The landmarks appeared in 3 orientations during the training, and the pigeons' goal-searching ability easily transferred to the landmarks presented in 3 novel orientations. Each landmark was asymmetric, so we next examined whether the pigeons used (a) the small-scale, local orientation information that could be inferred from each landmark individually, or (b) the large-scale, configural information that could be inferred from the spatial arrangement of multiple landmarks taken as a whole. Even when each single landmark appeared by itself, the pigeons were able to locate the goal accurately, suggesting that the large-scale, configural information was not essential. However, when 1 landmark locally pointed to a location that was consistent with the triangular configuration and the other landmark locally pointed to a different location, the pigeons predominantly pecked at the configurally array-consistent location. These results suggest that the pigeons redundantly learned both the large-scale, configural strategy and the local, single-landmark strategy, but they mainly used the latter information, and used the former information solely to disambiguate conflicts when the 2 landmarks pointed toward different targets. Such flexible learning and use of redundant information may reflect the pigeons' adaptation to unstable wild environments during their evolutionary history.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Letters, Chiba University, Japan. ushitani@L.chiba-u.ac.jp
authors.forename: Tomokazu
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ushitani
authors.forename: Masako
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Jitsumori
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D010856:Columbidae; D003216:Conditioning, Operant; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005106:Exploratory Behavior; D009949:Orientation; D011340:Problem Solving; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013028:Space Perception; D014163:Transfer, Psychology; D014584:User-Computer Interface