I was looking at information for pigeon responses. It seems as though they don't neglect base rate as easily as humans tend to. So far I believe it's because there is not adversive consequence in most experiments that pigeons face. Humans suffer greatly for being wrong often while the pigeons just miss out on food for a trial and try again the next. Do you know any thing that would help me discover if adversive stimuli would have an effect.

-- Kelly Schmidtke (schm1178@umn.edu), November 03, 2003

Answers

[Posted for ASW by cdg.]

The study of AVERSIVE stimuli in the pigeon laboratory was well established by the 1970s, if not before, and the literature is quite easy to recover from the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior or any text on learning. Work by Russell Church will be most useful in this regard.

-- Andrew S. Winston (awinston@uoguelph.ca), November 04, 2003.