Discrimination of direction of movements in pigeons following previous experience of motion/static discrimination.

Two experiments examined pigeons' discrimination of directional movement using pictorial images shown on computer monitors. Stimuli consisted of the movement of a bird against a stationary background or the movement of the background behind a stationary bird. In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained to discriminate either leftward or rightward motion of either the bird or the background from stationary frames drawn from the same movies. The background-discrimination group acquired the discrimination faster than the bird-discrimination group. In Experiment 2, transfer of the discrimination from the task of Experiment 1 to a discrimination between motion directions was examined. Most of the pigeons learned this discrimination rapidly, whereas in a pilot study in which direction discrimination was trained without previous static/movement discrimination, learning was poor. It appears that an experimental history of movement against stationary discrimination promoted the pigeons' learning of the directional motion discrimination.