Coding Processes in Pigeons
Douglas S. Grant · Animal Cognition · 2013
An invitation to author a chapter in a volume honoring an esteemed colleague upon his retirement affords an occasion on which it seems appropriate to take a somewhat reflective look at the field to which Al Riley and the contributors to this volume have devoted such a large portion of their research energies. It has now been two decades since the publication in 1972 of seminal articles by Maki and Leuin (who were at that time graduate students working in Al Riley’s laboratory at Berkeley) and by Roberts. Both articles reported experiments using pigeon subjects and the delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) procedure. In DMTS, accurate performance requires the retention of information derived from the sample stimulus until the test response is executed. Although several prior studies had employed the DMTS procedure and pigeon subjects (e.g., Berryman, Cumming, & Nevin, 1963; Blough, 1959; Gumming & Berryman, 1965; Smith, 1967), the articles by Maki and Leuin (1972) and Roberts (1972) were unique in that the information-processing perspective, which was at that time well en trenched in the literature on learning and memory in humans, was employed to conceptualize and analyze performance in a working memory task (i.e., DMTS) in pigeons. It was those articles that, in large part, gave rise to the now rather substantial field comprising the experimental and theoretical analysis of what is typically referred to as working memory, a term coined by Honig (1978).