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Date Available

4-27-2026

Year of Publication

2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Psychology

Faculty

Thomas Zentall

Faculty

Michael Bardo

Abstract

One of the most widely used measures of working memory in non-human animals is the delayed matching to sample (DMTS) design. While this design can assess for duration of working memory, alternative accounts can be made to explain decrements in retention. In addition, DMTS does not assess capacity of working memory in terms of number of items able to be held. The works in this dissertation aims to design a paradigm to measure capacity of number of items held in memory for non-human animals by asking animals to make a specific response after presentation of a random spatial sequence. While subjects did acquire the spatial order sequence task, early studies found that subjects were able to use a single-code default strategy, only having to encode the most recent location into memory. The single-code default strategy was accounted for in latter studies by providing subjects with a three-choice alternative. While doing so, it made learning difficult on trials where subjects are asked to respond to the first spatial location presented. A latter experiment remedied the difficulty however, and subjects were able to acquire the choose First rule significantly above chance, indicating true encoding of the first location into memory. The results of the final experiments showed a significant primacy effect when subjects were now presented with a sequence of three locations. In addition, subjects were able to learn a rule of choose “second” significantly above chance. Future studies should increase the number of locations presented to assess the limit of what pigeons can hold in memory. This dissertation has created an alternative procedure to measure working memory separate from traditional matching to sample studies and has replicated many of the effects seen in delayed matching to sample, as well as the serial position effect seen in human list learning.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2026.127

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