Oddity of visual patterns conceptualized by pigeons

Abstract

Pigeons were trained to learn an instrumental oddity-from-sample discrimination involving visual forms. One group, the "few examples" group, dealt with 5 patterns in 40 different combinations. Another group, the "many examples" group, dealt with 20 patterns in 160 different combinations. After both groups had reached asymptotic performance and had learned to operate under partial reinforcement conditions, they were tested for transfer under extinction conditions with two different groups of 5 novel patterns, each in 40 combinations. All animals showed significant above chance transfer to both of these novel stimulus sets. Transfer performance with test stimuli of similar geometric design to training stimuli was better than performance with stimuli of markedly different design. The transfer performance of the "many examples" group was marginally better than that of the "few examples" group, even though the latter's performance on the training stimuli was better throughout. It is concluded that pigeons can learn to employ an oddity concept and that this may be promoted by the use of many training exemplars. Furthermore, it is inferred that pigeons may normally use a mixture of strategies to solve oddity and identity problems. © 1984 Psychonomic Society, Inc.