It has been suggested that Discrimination abilities of pigeons be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

Pigeons have featured in numerous experiments in comparative psychology, including experiments concerned with animal cognition, and as a result we have considerable knowledge of pigeon intelligence. Image File history File links Mergefrom. ... In a famous article in 1995, Watanabe, Sakamoto and Wakita described an experiment which showed that pigeons can be trained to discriminate between paintings by Picasso and Monet. ... Pigeon redirects here. ... A brain of a cat Psychologists and scientists do not always agree on what should be considered Comparative Psychology. ... Animal cognition, or cognitive ethology, is the title given to a modern approach to the mental capacities of animals. ...

Available data show, for example, that:

• Pigeons have the capacity to share attention between different dimensions of a stimulus, but (like humans and other animals) their performance with multiple dimensions is worse than with a single stimulus dimension.
• Pigeons can be taught relatively complex actions and response sequences, and can learn to make responses in different sequences.
• Pigeons readily learn to respond in the presence of one simple stimulus and withhold responding in the presence of a different stimulus, or to make different responses in the presence of different stimuli.
• Pigeons can discriminate between other individual pigeons, and can use the behaviour of another individual as a cue to tell them what response to make.
• Pigeons readily learn to make discriminative responses to different categories of stimuli, defined either by arbitrary rules (e.g. green triangles) or by human concepts (e.g. pictures of human beings).
• Pigeons can learn to discriminate psychoactive drugs, either legal or illegal, and respond differently depending on the drug's effects. ^{[citation needed]}
• They do less well with categories defined by abstract logical relationships, e.g. "symmetrical" or "same", though some experimenters have successfully trained pigeons to discriminate such categories.
• Pigeons seem to require more information than humans for constructing a three-dimensional image from a plane representation.
• Pigeons seem to have difficulty in dealing with problems involving classes of classes. Thus they do not do very well with the isolation of a relationship among variables, as against a representation of a set of exemplars.
• Pigeons can remember large numbers of individual images for a long time, e.g. hundreds of images for periods of several years.

All these are capacities that are likely to be found in most mammal and bird species. In addition pigeons have unusual, perhaps unique, abilities to learn routes back to their home from long distances. This homing behaviour is different from that of birds that show migration, which usually occurs over a fixed route at fixed times of the year, whereas homing is more flexible; however similar mechanisms may be involved. This article is about psychological concept of attention. ... An assortment of psychoactive drugs A psychoactive drug or psychotropic substance is a chemical substance that acts primarily upon the central nervous system where it alters brain function, resulting in temporary changes in perception, mood, consciousness and behavior. ... Subclasses & Infraclasses Subclass †Allotheria* Subclass Prototheria Subclass Theria Infraclass †Trituberculata Infraclass Metatheria Infraclass Eutheria Mammals (class Mammalia) are warm-blooded, vertebrate animals characterized by the presence of sweat glands, including those that produce milk, and by the presence of: hair, three middle ear bones used in hearing, and a neocortex... For other uses, see Bird (disambiguation). ... Homing pigeon The homing pigeon is a variety of domesticated Rock Pigeon (Columba livia) that has been selectively bred to be able to find its way home over extremely long distances. ... Flock of Barnacle Geese during autumn migration Bird migration refers to the regular seasonal journeys of varying distances undertaken by many species of birds. ...

Additionally pigeons may be among the very few animals to pass the mirror test — which tests whether an animal recognizes its reflection as an image of itself — along with common chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, dolphins, elephants, and humans. However, the tests which purported to show that pigeons could pass the mirror test have been criticized by many scientists. The mirror test is a measure of self-awareness developed by Gordon Gallup Jr in 1970. ... Binomial name (Blumenbach, 1775) distribution of Common Chimpanzee. ... For other uses, see Bonobo (disambiguation). ... This article is about the primate. ... For other uses, see Dolphin (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Elephant (disambiguation). ... This article is about modern humans. ...

See also

• Animal intelligence
• Richard Herrnstein
• Donald Griffin
• Discrimination abilities of pigeons

The term Animal intelligence is currently used in three distinct but overlapping ways: as a synonym for animal cognition, to pose the question “are animals intelligent?”, or to denote a discussion of relative levels of intelligence in different animal species. ... Richard Herrnstein (1930-1994) was a prominent researcher in comparative psychology who did pioneering work on pigeon intelligence employing the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. ... Donald Redfield Griffin (August 3, 1915 - November 7, 2003) was an American professor of zoology at various universities who did seminal research in animal behavior, animal navigation, acoustic orientation and sensory biophysics. ... In a famous article in 1995, Watanabe, Sakamoto and Wakita described an experiment which showed that pigeons can be trained to discriminate between paintings by Picasso and Monet. ...

External links

• Avian Visual Cognition edited by Robert G. Cook - a cyber book containing much material about pigeons