title: Qualitative similarities in the visual short-term memory of pigeons and people.
abstract: Visual short-term memory plays a key role in guiding behavior, and individual differences in visual short-term memory capacity are strongly predictive of higher cognitive abilities. To provide a broader evolutionary context for understanding this memory system, we directly compared the behavior of pigeons and humans on a change detection task. Although pigeons had a lower storage capacity and a higher lapse rate than humans, both species stored multiple items in short-term memory and conformed to the same basic performance model. Thus, despite their very different evolutionary histories and neural architectures, pigeons and humans have functionally similar visual short-term memory systems, suggesting that the functional properties of visual short-term memory are subject to similar selective pressures across these distant species.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, Conant Hall, Durham, NH 03824-3567, USA. bgibson@cisunix.unh.edu
authors: Brett
authors: B
authors: Gibson
authors: Edward
authors: E
authors: Wasserman
authors: Steven J
authors: SJ
authors: Luck
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000818:Animals; D010856:Columbidae; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011587:Psychology, Comparative; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult