Prof. John Pearce - Pigeons

The experiment concluded that the pigeon could generalise to the concept of a tree and could successfully discriminate between a tree and a fern. They could also generalise to Picasso’s style of painting and to those that were similar but could also discriminate between different style of paintings so that’s..Read More

To further test the pigeons and their understanding of concepts, the pigeon was presented with pictures of Picasso and Monet and the pigeon again, was able to learn that only Picasso’s work would bring them food.

In the second phase of the experiment, the same pigeon was presented with a new set of images of trees and found that the pigeon again, was able to distinguish and recognise pictures of trees. So the pigeon had successfully formed the concept of a tree and was able to..Read More

He presented a pigeon with various different pictures, 30 of which were pictures of trees. He found that pigeons were able to learn that pecking at pictures of trees would bring them food and pecking at other pictures did not.