The oddity preference effect and the concept of difference in pigeons

Previous work in discrimination learning has shown that nonmatching (oddity) tasks are learned faster and more accurately than comparable matching tasks. This learning advantage has been coined the oddity preference effect (Wright & Delius in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 31, 425-432. doi: 10.1037/0097-7403.31.4.425 , 2005). Pigeons trained in a nonmatching task, following training in a same/different (S/D) task, learned the abstract concept of difference (Daniel et al., in Animal Cognition, 18(4), 831-837, 2015), but they did not show the expected faster acquisition or high levels of transfer from the oddity preference effect. In the present study, experimentally naive pigeons were trained in an identical nonmatching task to examine whether they would show the oddity preference effect on abstract-concept learning. These experimentally naive pigeons did show an oddity preference effect; their transfer to novel configurations was above chance with the initial (smallest) set size (3-item set) and was substantially more accurate than novel transfer in similar match-to-sample (MTS) or S/D tasks (Bodily et al., in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 34, 178-184. doi: 10.1037/0097-7403.34.1.178 , 2008; Katz & Wright in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 32, 80-86. doi: 10.1037/0097-7403.32.1.80 , 2006). As the number exemplars in the training set increased, transfer to novel configurations increased and reached equivalence to trained-stimulus performance with a 24-item set. Despite this transfer being equal to baseline performance with a 24-item set, subsequent transfers following training with larger set sizes declined before eventually rising again to baseline performance. This unusual set-size function (with inflection points at the 24- and 96-set sizes) suggests that these pigeons may have combined item-specific and relational learning strategies with differing emphasis as they acquired the abstract concept.