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SHORT‐TERM MEMORY IN THE PIGEON: DELAYED‐PAIR‐COMPARISON PROCEDURES AND SOME RESULTS 1
Author(s) -
Shimp Charles P.,
Moffitt Marilynne
Publication year - 1977
Publication title -
journal of the experimental analysis of behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1938-3711
pISSN - 0022-5002
DOI - 10.1901/jeab.1977.28-13
Subject(s) - mnemonic , stimulus (psychology) , recall , interference theory , psychology , audiology , reinforcement , short term memory , cognitive psychology , cognition , social psychology , working memory , neuroscience , medicine
A discrete‐trials, delayed‐pair‐comparison procedure was developed to study visual short‐term memory for tilted lines. In four experiments, pigeons' responses on left or right keys were reinforced with food depending on whether a comparison stimulus was or was not the same as a standard stimulus presented earlier in the same trial. In Experiment I, recall was an increasing function of the exposure time of the to‐be‐remembered stimulus and was a decreasing function of the retention interval. In Experiment II, retroactive interference was investigated: recall was poorer after a retention interval during which was presented either a tilted line or contextual stimuli in the form of the illuminated experimental chamber. In Experiment III, a subject was required to engage, throughout the retention interval, in one or the other of two different behaviors, depending on which of two stimuli a subject was to remember. This mnemonic strategy vastly improved recall after 15‐ and 20‐second retention intervals. In Experiment IV, the opposite end of the performance continuum was studied: by combining the effects of a larger stimulus set and the effects of what presumably was an increased memory load, performance was reduced to approximately chance levels after retention intervals shorter than 1 second.