ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a recent series of experiments carried out by the authors on Short-Term Memory (STM) in the pigeon. The procedure used in these experiments has been delayed matching to sample (DMTS), a variant of the delayed-response problem in which only the visual characteristics of a stimulus and not its spatial position must be retained in order to respond accurately after a delay. The delayed-response experiment with animals is analogous to the STM experiments with human subjects devised by John Brown and by Peterson and Peterson. The chapter considers the effects on pigeon STM of length of exposure to a sample stimulus, length of delay interval, and degree of spacing between repeated presentations of a sample stimulus. On the theoretical level, they have proposed a model of pigeon STM which holds that a memory trace of the sample stimulus grows in strength with exposure time and decays in the absence of the sample.
