Catarina Soares and Carlos Pinto, from the CIPsi's Animal Learning and Behavior Laboratory, in co-authorship with Armando Machado, published the article "Giving time a chance in the midsession reversal task" in the Learning & Behavior journal.
We are permanently learning rules about the world around us, many times without realizing it. Many situations can be learned in different ways – what determines the way we learn something? Or how individuals differ in what they learn?
Imagine the following task: you have to choose between two glasses (one is green and the other is red), and a coin is hidden in one of them. You have to make 40 consecutive choices: the coins are always under the red glass in the first 20 attempts and under the green glass in the last 20 attempts. However, you don't know this rule and you have to find out if there is a pattern while making your choices. You do this task once a day for several days. Which rule would you follow to get the highest number of coins? You could, for instance, choose the red glass as long as it had coins and choose the green glass as soon as the red glass no longer has coins. Or you could count the number of choices and change from the red glass to the green one on your 21st attempt. Or maybe measure how long it takes to make 20 choices and use that as a reference to change the glass.
When pigeons do similar tasks, the majority of them uses the latter strategy, changing their decision according to the time spent since the first attempt. In other words, they estimate the amount of time which has passed since the beginning of the task until the attempt the rule changes to know when they should change their preference. The rule that seems to be more difficult to follow by humans is the one pigeons prefer!
For this study, we developed a version of the task that allows to better observe the use of time measurement and we also found evidence, for the first time, that some pigeons count the number of attempts to know when they should change their preference.
Soares, C., Pinto, C., & Machado, A. (2023). Giving Time a Chance in the Midsession Reversal Task. Learning & Behavior.
https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-023-00606-z