We're starting to use touchscreens with pigeons in an arrangement I have not used before, so I need your expertise. The arrangement is a large touchscreen at the other end of the experimental chamber from the magazine. The Python autoshaping program that I have written does the usual things -- presents a "key" of randomized colors and locations on the black screen, followed by food delivery. The chambers we use are lit with normal room lighting
Will this work? It worries me that magazine training will engender hanging around by the hopper, so detecting the key onset may be difficult.
If any of you have expertise in autoshaping under such conditions, I'd appreciate any information
Thanks - michael
Hi Michael,
Cory Toegel, Michael Perone, and I have done some work designing and evaluating a touchscreen chamber for operant research with pigeons. We used an ELO resistive touchscreen monitor (Model: 0700L). The nice thing about that monitor is that it's short, so it fit above the feeder in an existing operant chamber that we modified for the project. We were able to establish keypecking through autoshaping, but we ran into some barriers with our initial design. We have a forthcoming paper that describes the design of our chamber and some evaluations of its performance under some common procedures used in the operant laboratory. If you're interested, I can share more about what we learned, but the fact our design had the monitor located on the same wall as the feeder might mean that it's not exactly what you're looking for.
Best wishes,
Forrest
Thanks -- I'l like to hear what problems you found autoshaping with touchscreens even though your setup is different. m
Hi Michael,
There is a PhD Candidate (I believe Georgina Carvell is the name) supervised by Dr. Randolph Grace at the University of Canterbury who was using touchscreens for her pigeon experiment at September 2019. I believe her set up was similar to yours in a sense that the touchscreen and the magazine cut-out were at opposite ends of the operant chamber. Reaching Dr. Grace or the PhD may be of use to you.
Regards,
Peter
Michael, my answer is a bit embarrassing. I was looking for a reference to this experiment and now I think that I did the experiment decades ago and simply didn't remember it. I built a long chamber. One wall had a key and the other had a hopper. I did autoshaping and the pigeon ran from the hopper to peck the key and then ran back to the hopper to get the food. I predict that you will find the pigeon will not hang around the hopper. Instead, he will run to the touchscreen, peck it and then run to the hopper.
One other thought. I found that having a houselight on was important to getting autoshaping. If the chamber is too dark, it doesn't seem to work.
Good luck.
A
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