Rapid acquisition of a novelty versus familiarity concept by pigeons (Columba livia).

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Pigeons performed a successive discrimination task in which responding to novel slides was rewarded, and responding to familiar slides, seen once previously, was not rewarded. In Experiment 1, naive Ss initially responded more rapidly to familiar slides, but all Ss learned to respond more rapidly to novel slides within a few sessions. In Experiment 2, Ss transferred immediately to novel trial sequences. Experiment 3 showed that both increased retention intervals and interpolated slide presentations impaired recognition. Experiment 4 showed that Ss treated duplicate slides as familiar and confirmed that Ss were using a versus concept. The authors conclude that such a concept is readily available to pigeons. This article concerns recognition memory in pigeons; it reports a series of experiments in which the birds had to base the decision of whether or not to respond solely on the novelty or familiarity of the stimulus displayed at the time of the decision. The technique that was used resembles the successive matching-to-sample paradigm proposed by Konorski (1959) and implemented by Wasserman (1976), but differs in two respects: First, pigeons are rewarded for responding to the initial presentation of a stimulus (corresponding to the sample phase), and are not rewarded for responding to the second presentation of a stimulus; second, unique stimuli are used throughout, so that each stimulus appears only once as a novel stimulus (the sample) and only once as a familiar stimulus. Because this task involves withholding responses to stimuli that on prior exposure were followed by reward, successful performance cannot plausibly be ascribed to reinforcement of associations involving specific stimuli and the pecking response. Previous investigations of recognition memory in pigeons suggested that pigeons may find it difficult to base their responding on novelty versus familiarity. Macphail (1980), for example, found very low levels of accuracy on a task in which pigeons made a choice between two white side keys on the basis of whether a stimulus on the center key matched or did not match any of a recently exposed list of from two to five stimuli. Greene (1983) found that although pigeons mastered a task that apparently required the recognition of stimuli, the pigeons had in fact learned to discriminate between