[Acquisition of audio-visual conditional discrimination in pigeons].

Pigeons were trained on a cross-modal conditional discrimination task in which the subjects were required to select visual comparison stimuli depending upon auditory conditional stimuli. In simultaneous condition, the auditory conditional stimuli were presented until the subjects selected one of the two visual stimuli. All subjects attained above 80% correct responses within 21-64 sessions. After simultaneous condition, all subjects were trained in 0-1-2- and 3-s delayed conditions. They showed above 80%-90% correct responses in zero delayed training. In 1-s and 2-s delayed conditions, the percentage of correct responses was not significantly different in comparison with 0-s delayed condition. The results indicated that pigeons could learn audio-visual cross-modal conditional discrimination task both in simultaneous and delayed conditions and had no greater difficulty learning them than learning visual (unimodal) conditional discrimination.