Further Efforts at Training Pigeons to Discriminate Changes in the Geomagnetic Field

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Abstract
Although magnetic sensitivity in pigeons can reasonably be inferred from the impairment of homing by magnetic attachments to their heads (e.g. Keeton, 1971; Walcott and Green, 1974), which have been found to contain magnetite (Walcott et al. 1979), attempts to develop training methods suitable for systematic psychophysical analysis have been largely unsuccessful. Of four classical conditioning experiments with magnetic change as the conditioned stimulus, shock as the unconditioned stimulus and overt activity (Orgel and Smith, 1954) or cardiac acceleration (Beaugrand, 1976; Kreithen and Keeton, 1974; Reille, 1968) as the conditioned response, only one (Reille’s) gave any indication of conditioning. Of three experiments in which pigeons were rewarded with food or water for pecking a target in response to magnetic change (Alsop, 1987; Meyer and Lambe, 1966; Moore et al. 1987), all gave negative results. Bookman (1977) had some success with a flight tunnel in which his animals were rewarded for going to one or the other of two food boxes depending on the prevailing magnetic field, but the results of similar experiments by subsequent investigators were negative (Carman et al. 1987; Mclsaac and Kreithen, 1987).