Temporal control of internal states in pigeons

To understand how animals serially organize complex competing behaviors, we tested pigeons in a sequential task-switching procedure. Daily sessions involved two conditional discrimination tasks that were presented in sequence. In Experiment 1, the first half of a session employed a matching-to-sample task, and the second half tested an oddity-from-sample task. Because the same colors were used for both tasks, these tasks could be solved only by employing a modulating sequential cue. The results of the first experiment revealed that the pigeons could learn this task-switching procedure and that an internal clock was the critical modulator between the tasks. In Experiment 2, we tested a three-alternative choice task. By examining the pattern of errors among choices, the results of this experiment revealed that pigeons learned and used different representations of the choice rules for each half of the experiment. This modulation of the pigeons' internal states by time has implications for how animals organize their behavior in different settings and holds clues as to the evolution of the serial organization of behavior.