TRANSFER OF PERFORMANCE TO NEW COMPARISON CHOICES FOLLOWING DIFFERENTIAL OUTCOME MATCHING-TO-SAMPLE

Four experiments examined transfer of differential outcome performance s to new choice responses in pigeons. Experiments 1A and 1B showed tha t new responses trained off a matching-to-sample baseline readily subs tituted for the choice alternatives in differential outcome matching, provided that they shared the same outcome associations as the alterna tives they replaced. Experiment 2 showed that comparison responses tra ined on baseline, but in a task in which their different outcomes occu rred equally often following each sample (viz,, one-to-many matching), substituted for the choices in a standard, differential outcome task. Experiment 3 showed, somewhat surprisingly, that the choices in the l atter task were Likewise effective substitutes in one-to-many matching . These results pose separate challenges for standard two-process theo ry and for the bidirectional account of differential outcome performan ce, and they suggest other cues that pigeons may use to predict outcom es.