Information processing during the presolution period: Stimulus location effects in discrimination learning.
Item
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Title
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Information processing during the presolution period: Stimulus location effects in discrimination learning.
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Identifier
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AAI3047264
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identifier
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3047264
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Creator
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Schupak, Cynthia.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Sheila Chase
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Psychobiology | Psychology, Cognitive | Psychology, Experimental
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Abstract
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The purpose of this research was to examine some of the processes through which organisms extract information from the environment. The experiments were designed to investigate what is learned by pigeons during training to visually discriminate between two forms, "x" and "⋄", as a means for obtaining food.;Experiment 1 provided evidence that the initial period of chance performance (the presolution period) is shortened for acquisition of a visual discrimination if it is preceded by discrimination training on an unrelated visual dimension. Birds required fewer trials to learn the form discrimination following pretraining on the color discrimination, and fewer trials were required to learn the color discrimination following pretraining on the form discrimination.;Results of Experiment 2 confirmed the prediction that birds that were trained to discriminate between the two stimuli only in a single central location displayed a significant decrease in accuracy when these same stimuli appeared in the four comer locations of the active area, a distance of 6.4 cm from the training location. In order to determine whether or not the decrease in accuracy was due to failure to visually process stimuli in the untrained locations, a novel form, the outline of a rectangle, appeared in one of each of these locations at the same time as either the "x" or the "⋄" appeared in the center location. It was expected that this novel form would disrupt performance for birds whose training had required them to "attend" to these and other locations, but would not interfere with the discrimination accuracy of birds whose training required that they attend only to stimuli in the center location. However, accuracy did not differ systematically under the two conditions (Experiment 3), an effect that was found to be independent of the distance between the distracter and the discriminative stimuli (Experiment 4). It appears that, even with the discriminative stimuli appearing only in a single location, the birds did not ignore the remainder of the screen, an effect which appears to be attributable, in part, to the characteristics of the touch screen. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
