A conventional conditioning analysis of "transitive inference" in pigeons.

Patricia A. Couvillon · M. E. Bitterman

87 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Experimental Psychology Animal Behavior Processes

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Behavioral and Psychological Studies Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics Child and Animal Learning Development

Abstract

As an alternative to a symbolic interpretation of transitivity in the discriminative performance of pigeons, a modified reinforcement theory (value transfer theory) was proposed by Fersen, Wynne, Delius, and Staddon (1991). Its novel assumption was that the value of the negative member of a pair of stimuli with which an animal is trained is enhanced by the value of the positive member of the pair. In this article, that assumption is shown to be unnecessary. All of the transitivity data for pigeons can be simulated with a simple conditioning model developed for honeybees that retains the conventional independence assumption. In a recent experiment by Fersen, Wynne, Delius, and Staddon (1991), pigeons were trained with five stimuli (A, B, C, D, and E) presented in four pairs, with the first member of each pair reinforced (A+ B-, B+ C-, C+ D-, and D+ E-), after which evidence of transitivity was sought—and found— in tests with B and D. The possibility of a conventional reinforcement interpretation of the preference for B over D was discounted by Fersen et al. on the grounds that the two stimuli had been equally often rewarded and nonrewarded during (p. 336), and they were as little inclined to the symbolic interpretations popular in the primate literature (e.g., Gillian, 1981), which seemed unsuitable for pigeons and which failed in any case to account for the ordering of the training data. What they proposed instead (both for pigeons and for primates) was a modified reinforcement interpretation called value transfer theory, the central assumption of which is that the value of the negative member of each pair of training stimuli is enhanced by the value of the positive.

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References

1981Reasoning in the chimpanzee: II. Transitive inference.1991Transitive inference formation in pigeons.1972"Configural" conditioning in discrete-trial bar pressing.

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2004TRANSITIVE RESPONDING IN HOODED CROWS REQUIRES LINEARLY ORDERED STIMULI 1997Pigeon transitive inference: Tests of simple accounts of a complex performance 1995Transitive inference in pigeons: Simplified procedures and a test of value transfer theory 2010Cognitive representation in transitive inference: A comparison of four corvid species 2006Effect of stimulus orderability and reinforcement history on transitive responding in pigeons 2007Reasoning and Problem Solving 2011Transitive inference in pigeons: Measuring the associative values of Stimuli B and D

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