Capacity and limits of associative memory in pigeons

• Published in: Psychonomic bulletin & review Vol. 12; no. 2; pp. 350 - 358
• Main Authors: COOK, Robert G, LEVISON, Deborah G, GILLETT, Sarah R, BLAISDELL, Aaron P
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Austin, TX Psychonomic Society 01-04-2005; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Animal; Animals; Association; Biological and medical sciences; Birds; Cognition; Cognition & reasoning; Columbidae; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Learning; Learning. Memory; Male; Memory; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Visual Perception; Visualization; Associative memory; Vertebrata; Visual memory; Animal; Memory capacity; Cognition; Aves; Long term; Pigeon
• ISSN: 1069-9384; 1531-5320
• DOI: 10.3758/bf03196384

How much information can a brain store over a lifetime's experience? The answer to this important, but little researched, question was investigated by looking at the long-term visual memory capacity of 2 pigeons. Over 700 sessions, the pigeons were tested with an increasingly larger pool of pictorial stimuli in a two-alternative discrimination task (incremented in sets of 20 or 30 pictures). Each picture was randomly assigned to either a right or a left choice response, forcing the pigeons to memorize each picture and its associated response. At the end of testing, 1 pigeon was performing at 73% accuracy with a memory set of over 1,800 pictures, and the 2nd was at 76% accuracy with a memory set of over 1,600 pictures. Adjusted for guessing, models of the birds' performance suggested that the birds had access, on average, to approximately 830 memorized picture-response associations and that these were retained for months at a time. Reaction time analyses suggested that access to these memories was parallel in nature. Over the last 6 months of testing, this capacity estimate was stable for both birds, despite their learning increasingly more items, suggesting some limit on the number of picture-response associations that could be discriminated and retained in the long-term memory portion of this task. This represents the first empirically established limit on long-term memory use for any vertebrate species. The existence of this large exemplar-specific memory capacity has important implications for the evolution of stimulus control and for current theories of avian and human cognition.