Pigeons (Columba livia) associate time intervals with symbols in a touch screen task: Evidence for ordinality but not summation.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present experiments examined whether pigeons can sum symbols that are associated with various temporal consequences in a touch screen apparatus. Pigeons were trained to discriminate between two visual symbols that were associated with 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 s either of delay to 4 s of hopper access (delay group) or duration of hopper access (reward group). In Experiment 1, the pigeons in both groups learned to select the symbol associated with the more favorable outcome, and they successfully transferred this discrimination to novel symbol pairs. However, when tested with 2 pairs of symbols associated with different summed durations, they responded on the basis of a simple response rule rather than the sum of the symbol pair. In Experiment 2, the reward group was presented with four symbols at once and was allowed to successively choose one symbol at a time. All pigeons chose the symbols in order from largest to smallest. This indicates that pigeons formed an ordered representation of symbols associated with different time intervals, even though they did not sum the symbols.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".