Expertise of Pigeons (Columbia livia)

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the development of expertise in pigeons. Expertise can be defined in many ways; as the progressive increase in efficiency when more novel instances of a task are learned; as lifetime learning; as the product of deliberate practice; and as exceptional performance, a social construct, or having a particular amount of knowledge of a task. The expertise of thirty-one experimentally naïve pigeons was examined through use of the serial order task. Four groups of subjects were trained to learn lists of photographs; of the thirty-one subjects, twenty completed twenty-five 2-item lists and eight completed twenty 3-item lists with increasing efficiency. The subjects’ increases in performance were similar to the performance seen in monkeys on similar tasks with regard to error patterns, increases in efficiency, and use of declarative knowledge. The subjects’ performance did not approximate that of an ideal list learner, however, the subjects have not yet finished training and show promise in increasing their inhibition of repeat responses which will aid their performance markedly. The subjects developed, to a lesser extent than monkeys, serial expertise. The subjects’ performance is then reviewed with respect to other definitions of expertise allowing us to conclude that pigeons, as well as developing serial expertise, are capable of the development of expertise as a whole