The nature of the response in Simon discriminations by pigeons

Abstract

Spence (1952) postulated that under some conditions, responding in simple discriminations is controlled by compounds or patterns consisting of the nominal discriminative cue, plus its spatial position. Stimulus control by such compounds was said to develop when no single cue or element was systematically reinforced more than any other. This analysis has been applied to good effect in understanding some peculiar accuracy results obtained from pigeons performing Simon discrimination tasks. This article describes how Spence's cue-position analysis provides a better account of pigeons' performance in this task than do nominal cue-only and configurational views of the functional discriminative stimuli. Adding a value transfer assumption improves the ability of the cue-position hypothesis to account for the accuracy data. Copyright 2008 Psychonomic Society, Inc.