Place and object learning in chicks (Gallus gallus domesticus).

Trained chicks (Gallus gallus domesticus) to discriminate between two identical boxes containing food on the basis of the positions of the boxes. Once learning was accomplished, the visual characteristics (color or size) of the boxes were changed and chicks were retrained to criterion. Results showed that chicks remembered more about visual characteristics of the boxes than about their position. The same results did not occur, however, if the change was limited only to parts of the boxes rather than to the entire object. Further experiments indicated that it was not the amount of physical change as such that produced these different results but rather the way in which animals select meaningful objects in their perceptual organization of the environment. We argue that chicks define spatial locations in terms of the relative positions of objects and that in so doing they also encode those visual characteristics that make possible perceptual segregation of distinct objects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)