SCALING PIGEONS' CHOICE OF FEEDS: BIGGER IS BETTER

Abstract

Preferences of hungry pigeons among 10 grains and pellets were analyzed using a Thurstone scaling procedure. The recovered scales were positively correlated with size of the feed. The correlations improved when the Thurstonian assumption of equal‐sized discriminal dispersions (Case V) was replaced with the assumption of proportional‐sized dispersions (Case VI), as entailed by Weber's law. The correlations weakened when the experiments were conducted with the pigeons close to their free‐feeding weights, where the probability of sampling alternative grains increased. In the final experiment, exposure to a large pellet shifted the preferences between two smaller pellets.