Kouwenhoven Marijn, Colombo Michael
Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
PLoS One. 2016 Mar 2;11(3):e0150510. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0150510. eCollection 2016.
We used delay-interval interference to investigate the nature of the differential outcomes effect (DOE) in pigeons. Birds were trained on a delayed matching-to-sample (DMS) task under either common outcome or differential outcome conditions, and then presented with visual interference during the delay period. Consistent with previous literature, the common outcomes birds were slower to learn the DMS task than the differential outcomes birds. The common outcome birds were also more impaired by the visual interference than the differential outcomes birds. Our findings are consistent with the view that the birds trained with common outcomes were likely remembering the sample stimulus during the delay period, and hence were disrupted by the visual interference, whereas the birds trained with differential outcomes were likely relying on the different emotional reactions elicited by the different outcomes to guide their choice behaviour, and hence were less affected by the visual interference. Our findings suggest that the DOE is not truly evidence of anticipatory mediation of short-term retention in pigeons, but rather emotionally driven decision making, which is not truly anticipatory in nature.
我们采用延迟间隔干扰来研究鸽子的差异结果效应（DOE）的本质。鸟类在共同结果或差异结果条件下接受延迟匹配样本（DMS）任务训练，然后在延迟期呈现视觉干扰。与先前文献一致，共同结果组的鸟类学习DMS任务比差异结果组的鸟类慢。共同结果组的鸟类也比差异结果组的鸟类更容易受到视觉干扰的影响。我们的研究结果与以下观点一致：接受共同结果训练的鸟类在延迟期可能记住了样本刺激，因此受到视觉干扰的干扰，而接受差异结果训练的鸟类可能依靠不同结果引发的不同情绪反应来指导其选择行为，因此受视觉干扰的影响较小。我们的研究结果表明，DOE并非鸽子短期记忆预期调节的真正证据，而是情绪驱动的决策，本质上并非真正的预期。
