Effect of stimulus orderability and reinforcement history on transitive responding in pigeons

Transitive responding in humans and non-human animals has attracted considerable attention because of its presumably inferential nature. In an attempt to replicate our earlier study with crows [Lazareva, O.F., Smirnova, A.A., Bagozkaja, M.S., Zorina, Z.A., Rayevsky, V.V., Wasserman, E.A., 2004. Transitive responding in hooded crows requires linearly ordered stimuli. J. Exp. Anal. Behav. 82, 1–19], we trained pigeons to discriminate overlapping pairs of colored squares (A+ B−, B+ C−, C+ D−, and D+ E−). For some birds, the colored squares, or primary stimuli, were followed by a circle of the same color (feedback stimuli) whose diameter decreased from A to E (Ordered Feedback group); these circles were made available to help order the stimuli along a physical dimension. For other birds, all of the feedback stimuli had the same diameter (Constant Feedback group). In later testing, novel choice pairs were presented, including the critical BD pair. The pigeons’ reinforcement history with Stimuli B and D was controlled, so that the birds should not have chosen Stimulus B during the BD test. Unlike the crows, the pigeons selected Stimulus B over Stimulus D in both ordered and Constant Feedback groups, suggesting that the orderability of the post-choice feedback stimuli did not affect pigeons’ transitive responding. Post hoc simulations showed that associative models [Wynne, C.D.L., 1995. Reinforcement accounts for transitive inference (TI) performance. Anim. Learn. Behav. 23, 207–217; Siemann, M., Delius, J.D., 1998. Algebraic learning and neural network models for transitive and non-transitive responding. Eur. J. Cogn. Psychol. 10, 307–334] failed to predict pigeons’ responding in the BD test.