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Reflexivity In Pigeons, Mary M. Sweeney, Peter J. Urcuioli

Department of Psychological Sciences Faculty Publications

A recent theory of pigeons’ equivalence-class formation (Urcuioli, 2008) predicts that reflexivity, an untrained ability to match a stimulus to itself, should be observed after training on two “mirror-image” symbolic successive matching tasks plus identity successive matching using some of the symbolic matching stimuli. One group of pigeons was trained in this fashion; a second group was trained similarly but with successive oddity (rather than identity). Subsequently, comparison-response rates on novel matching versus mismatching sequences with the remaining symbolic matching stimuli were measured on non-reinforced probe trials. Higher rates were observed on matching than on mismatching probes in the former …