Do hummingbirds use contextual information when performing spatial association tasks?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One factor hindering the flow of information between the related disciplines of psychology and behavioural ecology is their different foci. Psychologists have searched for general principles governing animal learning and behaviour, while behavioural ecologists have concentrated more on the adaptive significance of behaviour. Focussing investigation on how animals solve particular problems of ecological significance can provide a common frame of reference for both disciplines. This thesis explores the kinds of information rufous hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus) use to solve spatial association problems. The spatial association paradigm differs from other associative tasks in that subjects must associate a lit cue in an array of several cues with a rewarding feeder in an array of several feeders that are spatially separated from the cue array. In four experiments hummingbirds learned a baseline spatial association task and then performed it in a treatment in which the spatial context of the task was altered. Each experiment precluded the use of a particular kind of information. Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that the birds were using a simple behavioural rule such as "fly to the feeder nearest the lit cue" to perform the spatial association task. This behavioural mechanism was independent of changes in the spatial context of the task, including the geometry of the arrays, on two spatial scales. Experiment 3 showed that hummingbirds could learn a spatial association task in which the correct feeder was one of two equally close to the cue and that performance on this task was independent of the associated elements occurring in a coherent geometric array of other elements. Experiment 4 showed that, contrary to the predictions of associative learning theory, hummingbirds attend to both feeders nearest the lit cue when performing a task like that in Experiment 3. Their performance on this task, however, was strongly linked to the orientation of the cue and two nearest feeders with respect to some global referent. The birds exhibited a large amount of sign-tracking in the above experiments. Analysis of when they sign-tracked in the context of their performance in the tasks suggested that they were approaching the cue as part of their strategy for accurately locating the correct feeder after they had learned the association.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".