Premium
PIGEONS' WAIT‐TIME RESPONSES TO TRANSITIONS IN INTERFOOD‐INTERVAL DURATION: ANOTHER LOOK AT CYCLIC SCHEDULE PERFORMANCE
Author(s) -
Higa Jennifer J.,
Thaw Jean M.,
Staddon John E. R.
Publication year - 1993
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.1993.59-529
Subject(s) - duration (music) , schedule , interval (graph theory) , session (web analytics) , time point , sequence (biology) , computer science , statistics , time perception , audiology , psychology , simulation , mathematics , medicine , biology , neuroscience , combinatorics , cognition , art , philosophy , literature , aesthetics , world wide web , genetics , operating system
Recent developments reveal that animals can rapidly learn about intervals of time. We studied the nature of this fast‐acting process in two experiments. In Experiment 1 pigeons were exposed to a modified fixed‐time schedule, in which the time between food rewards (interfood interval) changed at an unpredictable point in each session, either decreasing from 15 to 5 s (step‐down) or increasing from 15 to 45 s (step‐up). The birds were able to track under both conditions by producing postreinforcement wait times proportional to the preceding interfood‐interval duration. However, the time course of responding differed: Tracking was apparently more gradual in the step‐up condition. Experiment 2 studied the effect of having both kinds of transitions within the same session by exposing pigeons to a repeating (cyclic) sequence of the interfood‐interval values used in Experiment 1. Pigeons detected changes in the input sequence of interfood intervals, but only for a few sessions—discrimination worsened with further training. The dynamic effects we observed do not support a linear waiting process of time discrimination, but instead point to a timing mechanism based on the frequency and recency of prior interfood intervals and not the preceding interfood interval alone.