Discrimination of Individuals in Pigeons

Pigeons Columba livia were trained in an operant chamber with food reinforcement to discriminate between colour slides of faces of two Pigeons. The Pigeons could identify those individuals that were easily identified by human observers, but had difficulty with those found difficult for humans. Results of the chimera test of mixed figures of two birds suggested that there is no single cue for individual recognition in this species. The absence of responses to slides of randomly scrambled parts of the stimulus bird indicated that the test birds saw the slides of conspecifics as representatives of real birds.