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TIMING MULTIMODAL EVENTS IN PIGEONS
Author(s) -
Cheng Ken,
Roberts William A.
Publication year - 1989
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.1989.52-363
Subject(s) - duration (music) , signal (programming language) , tone (literature) , interval (graph theory) , event (particle physics) , statistics , mathematics , time perception , audiology , communication , computer science , psychology , acoustics , physics , medicine , neuroscience , combinatorics , astrophysics , art , cognition , literature , programming language
The peak procedure was used in two experiments to study pigeons' ability to time multimodal events. In the first experiment, birds were trained to time a single event consisting of a 9‐s tone or light followed by a 21‐s fixed interval associated with a signal of light or tone (signal of the other modality). On occasional empty trials, different lengths of the first signal were followed by a long period of the second signal. Peak response times as a function of the duration of the first signal were linear and had a slope of close to one in all birds. This indicates that the birds were timing only the second signal. In a second experiment, two complex events were used in training. One consisted of a 9‐s tone or light followed by a 21‐s fixed interval associated with a light or tone. The other consisted of a 21‐s tone or light followed by a 9‐s fixed interval associated with a light or tone. Different durations of the first signal were again used on empty trials. Peak response times as a function of the duration of the first signal were again linear in all birds. The slope of the function was less than one but greater than zero for 3 birds. This indicates that these birds were partly timing the entire complex event of 30‐s duration and partly timing only the second signal of the event. A model is proposed in which the bird takes as a criterion for timing a weighted average of different target criteria. Comparisons with the performance of rats are made.