What is it about?
Pigeons were trained to discriminate a moving stimulus from a stationary stimulus. In one experiment, the stimulus was a rotating disc with radial stripes. In a second experiment, the stimulus was a vertically moving film strip with horizontal bars. Several psychophysical procedures were used to determine the minimal detectable velocity of movement.
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Why is it important?
A signal-detection analysis of the psychophysical data indicated systematic changes in response bias that were related to the ordinal position of the stimulus velocity in the sequence.
Perspectives
The detection thresholds for most of the pigeons fell in the range of 4,4 to 6,5 millimeters per second, corresponding to a retinal velocity of 4.1 to 6.01 degrees per second. Some research suggests that at velocities greater than 0.4 degrees per second , humans can readily distinguish the direction of movement.
Professor Lars Smith
University of Oslo
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This page is a summary of: Detection of the velocity of movement of visual stimuli by pigeons?, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, March 1976, Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,
DOI: 10.1901/jeab.1976.25-143.
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