Ushitani Tomokazu, Jitsumori Masako
Faculty of Letters, Chiba University, Japan.
J Comp Psychol. 2011 Aug;125(3):317-27. doi: 10.1037/a0023044.
Three touch screen-based experiments were conducted to investigate whether pigeons would learn to use configural information about a goal's location in relation to a multiple-landmark array. In Experiment 1, 4 pigeons (Columba livia) were trained to peck a computer monitor at a location that constituted the third vertex of a hypothetical triangle defined by 2 different landmarks. The landmarks appeared in 3 orientations during the training, and the pigeons' goal-searching ability easily transferred to the landmarks presented in 3 novel orientations. Each landmark was asymmetric, so we next examined whether the pigeons used (a) the small-scale, local orientation information that could be inferred from each landmark individually, or (b) the large-scale, configural information that could be inferred from the spatial arrangement of multiple landmarks taken as a whole. Even when each single landmark appeared by itself, the pigeons were able to locate the goal accurately, suggesting that the large-scale, configural information was not essential. However, when 1 landmark locally pointed to a location that was consistent with the triangular configuration and the other landmark locally pointed to a different location, the pigeons predominantly pecked at the configurally array-consistent location. These results suggest that the pigeons redundantly learned both the large-scale, configural strategy and the local, single-landmark strategy, but they mainly used the latter information, and used the former information solely to disambiguate conflicts when the 2 landmarks pointed toward different targets. Such flexible learning and use of redundant information may reflect the pigeons' adaptation to unstable wild environments during their evolutionary history.
进行了三项基于触摸屏的实验，以研究鸽子是否会学习利用与多地标阵列相关的目标位置的构型信息。在实验1中，训练4只鸽子（家鸽）在由两个不同地标定义的假想三角形的第三个顶点位置啄击电脑显示器。在训练过程中，地标以三种方向出现，鸽子的目标搜索能力很容易转移到以三种新方向呈现的地标上。每个地标都是不对称的，所以接下来我们研究鸽子是使用（a）可以从每个地标单独推断出的小规模局部方向信息，还是（b）可以从多个地标作为一个整体的空间排列中推断出的大规模构型信息。即使每个单个地标单独出现时，鸽子也能够准确地找到目标，这表明大规模构型信息并非必不可少。然而，当一个地标局部指向与三角形构型一致的位置，而另一个地标局部指向不同的位置时，鸽子主要啄击与构型阵列一致的位置。这些结果表明，鸽子冗余地学习了大规模构型策略和局部单地标策略，但它们主要使用后者的信息，并且仅在两个地标指向不同目标时使用前者的信息来消除冲突。这种对冗余信息的灵活学习和使用可能反映了鸽子在进化历史中对不稳定野生环境的适应。
