{"pk":5624,"title":"Pigeons  (Columba livia) distinguish between absence of events and lack of evidence in contingency learning","subtitle":null,"abstract":"When information about an event is perceptually occluded, individuals might recognize that the event might be present but that they cannot detect it because of the occluder. In such situations, an individual should continue to believe that the prevailing contingencies have not changed. This is in stark contrast to conditions where an expected event is explicitly absent, which should lead the individual to update their contingency knowledge. In an autoshaping procedure, we tested whether pigeons can discriminate conditions of perceptual ambiguity from perceptual certainty. Pigeons first learned to peck at two Pavlovian visual cues, followed by extinction of one of the cues. During extinction, the feeder was occluded by a metal shield for pigeons in Group Occluded, while the metal shield was placed next to but not covering the feeder for pigeons in Group Un-Occluded. On a final test with the metal shield removed, pigeons in Group Un-occluded pecked less at the extinguished cue than at the un-extinguished cue; while pigeons in Group Occluded pecked at an equally high rate to both cues. These results replicate in pigeons similar results reported in rats by Waldmann et al. (2012), and show that pigeons are able to discriminate conditions of certainty from conditions of ambiguity.","language":"en","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0","short_name":"CC BY 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\r\n\r\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0"},"keywords":[{"word":"mental imagery"},{"word":"Pigeons"},{"word":"extinction"},{"word":"Contingency"},{"word":"perceptual ambiguity"}],"section":"Research Article","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9wj9m6p0","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Aida","middle_name":"","last_name":"Longan","name_suffix":"","institution":"UCLA Department of Psychology","department":"None"},{"first_name":"Aaron","middle_name":"P","last_name":"Blaisdell","name_suffix":"","institution":"UCLA","department":"None"}],"date_submitted":"2022-09-13T20:01:31Z","date_accepted":"2022-09-13T20:01:31Z","date_published":"2023-03-22T07:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/uclapsych_ijcp/article/5624/galley/3400/download/"}]}