Meet the flock!

I know it's been a while since you've heard from us. The Fall quarter was a very busy time. I'm just about finished with teaching two courses (an upper division course on Comparative Psychobiology, and a freshman seminar on dog cognition), and I'm just about done prepping my final exam.

But, the team and I have NOT been idle! In fact, we have our flock of birds and they are already making headway being trained on the behavioral procedure.

First, let me introduce you to the flock of pigeons. It turns out that we only need 16 pigeons to complete all of the experiments we have planned.

 

A stunning group of birds, don't you think? Our flock is a mix of two varieties of pigeon. The white birds are called White Carneaux, and the birds with coloring are Racing Homing pigeons (or "homers" for short).

The birds are first trained to peck at a visual stimulus presented on the touchscreen in the operant chamber. Training involves first presenting a visual stimulus, such as a white circle, on the center of the screen and presenting food from the hopper below the screen every 2 minutes. When the food is presented, the circle disappears from the screen. A few minutes later the circle reappears on the screen for the next trial. Dozens of trials are given in each session, and the pigeon begins to learn to associate the appearance of the circle with the arrival of food. They perk up and take notice, and eventually begin to peck at the circle.

When the pigeon starts pecking at the circle, we change the contingency of food delivery from a Pavlovian contingency (where the pigeon doesn't have to peck the circle in order for food to be delivered) to a instrumental (or operant) one, for which the pigeon MUST peck the circle in order to receive the food. As you can imagine, the rate of pecking to the circle really takes off once the instrumental contingency is in place.

The birds have gone through this training (called shaping), passing with flying colors! Now they have all moved on to the behavioral task to test for object-place binding, as described in prior lab notes (in case you don't remember the specifics, you can see the video of the procedure here:https://experiment.com/u/4vOqfA).

Now that the birds are "playing the game" as we say in the lab, I'll be able to post an update in a couple of weeks with some preliminary data! Stay tuned!

Aaron Blaisdell

(PS. if you have any questions about the birds, the research, or life in the lab, please don't hesitate to ask in the comments.)