Time discrimination in Columba livia and Homo sapiens.
- 1 January 1992
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes
- Vol. 18 (1) , 80-94
- https://doi.org/10.1037//0097-7403.18.1.80
Abstract
Pigeons' ability to discriminate stimulus duration, focusing on stimuli less than 1 s in duration, was evaluated in 4 experiments. In Experiment 1, the performances of pigeons and humans were compared with a staircase technique, and in Experiment 2, the method of constant stimuli was used. Both experiments produced similar results: The pigeon and human data were well described by the generalized form of Weber's law (Getty, 1975). Experiment 3 demonstrated that the birds did not use perceived brightness to mediate the discrimination of brief visual durations. Experiment 4 used a modified staircase procedure that yielded a continuous measure of discrimination from absolute threshold (0 s) to about 1 s. The difference thresholds were constant over a considerable range, similar to findings reported by Kristofferson (1980) for human timing.Keywords
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