Flexible learning and use of multiple-landmark information by pigeons (Columba livia) in a touch screen-based goal searching task

Abstract

Three touch screen-based experiments were conducted to investigate whether pigeons would learn to use configural information about a goal's location in relation to a multiple-landmark array. In Experiment 1, 4 pigeons (Columba livia) were trained to peck a computer monitor at a location that constituted the third vertex of a hypothetical triangle defined by 2 different landmarks. The landmarks appeared in 3 orientations during the training, and the pigeons' goal-searching ability easily transferred to the landmarks presented in 3 novel orientations. Each landmark was asymmetric, so we next examined whether the pigeons used (a) the small-scale, local orientation information that could be inferred from each landmark individually, or (b) the large-scale, configural information that could be inferred from the spatial arrangement of multiple landmarks taken as a whole. Even when each single landmark appeared by itself, the pigeons were able to locate the goal accurately, suggesting that the large-scale, configural information was not essential. However, when 1 landmark locally pointed to a location that was consistent with the triangular configuration and the other landmark locally pointed to a different location, the pigeons predominantly pecked at the configurally array-consistent location. These results suggest that the pigeons redundantly learned both the large-scale, configural strategy and the local, single-landmark strategy, but they mainly used the latter information, and used the former information solely to disambiguate conflicts when the 2 landmarks pointed toward different targets. Such flexible learning and use of redundant information may reflect the pigeons' adaptation to unstable wild environments during their evolutionary history.