Delayed discriminations in the pigeon: The role of within-trial location of conditional cues

Abstract

Four pigeons were trained in a delayed conditional discrimination in which color and line cues jointly indicated trial outcome. These were either combined in advance of a retention interval (RI) or separately presented before and after the RI. The former procedure resulted in less forgetting over the RI, the difference increasing with longer RIs. In a second study, the line cue was presented redundantly before and after the RI, and then selectively omitted from either temporal location during probe tests. In general, the results indicated that the birds relied upon the line as a cue to a greater extent when it was compounded with the color in advance of the RI than when it was presented after the RI. The data support an interpretation based on anticipatory processing in working memory, which leads to better retention than retrospective remembering. © 1983 Psychonomic Society, Inc.