Katz Jeffrey S, Wright Anthony A
Department of Psychology, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849, USA.
J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process. 2006 Jan;32(1):80-6. doi: 10.1037/0097-7403.32.1.80.
Eight pigeons were trained and tested in a simultaneous same/different task. After pecking an upper picture, they pecked a lower picture to indicate same or a white rectangle to indicate different. Increases in the training set size from 8 to 1,024 items produced improved transfer from 51.3% to 84.6%. This is the first evidence that pigeons can perform a two-item same/different task as accurately with novel items as training items and both above 80% correct. Fixed-set control groups ruled out training time or transfer testing as producing the high level of abstract-concept learning. Comparisons with similar experiments with rhesus and capuchin monkeys showed that the ability to learn the same/different abstract concept was similar but that pigeons require more training exemplars.
八只鸽子接受了同时进行的相同/不同任务的训练和测试。在啄了上面的一幅图片后，它们啄下面的一幅图片表示相同，或者啄一个白色矩形表示不同。训练集大小从8个项目增加到1024个项目，使迁移准确率从51.3%提高到84.6%。这是首个证据表明鸽子能够像对训练项目一样准确地对新的项目执行两项相同/不同任务，且两者的正确率均高于80%。固定组对照组排除了训练时间或迁移测试导致高水平抽象概念学习的可能性。与恒河猴和卷尾猴的类似实验比较表明，学习相同/不同抽象概念的能力相似，但鸽子需要更多的训练范例。
