Manipulations of the spatial stability of an occasion setter alter some aspect of behavior during a landmark-based search task

Abstract

An occasion setter (OS) is a stimulus that sets the occasion for responding to another stimulus. The current experiments examined the effect of spatial stability (Experiment 1a) and retraining of an OS (Experiment 1b) in a spatial occasion setting task in pigeons. An OS (i.e., a colored background) set the occasion for the location at which pecks were reinforced relative to a landmark (i.e., a colored square). In Experiment 1a, pigeons were trained with an OS that had an unstable spatial relationship with the goal. In Experiment 1b, an OS was retrained as a spatially unstable OS for another landmark or a spatially unstable discriminative stimulus. The pigeons failed to demonstrate evidence of acquisition of all of the OS trials in Experiment 1a, and retraining of the OS disrupted accuracy for both conditions in Experiment 1b. Spatial instability and/or a lack of nonreinforced landmark training disrupted performance.