I can time with a little help from my friends: effect of social enrichment on timing processes in Pigeons (Columba livia)

Abstract

There is evidence that impulsive decision-making is associated with errors in timing. However, there has been little attempt to identify the putative mechanism responsible for impulsive animals' timing errors. One means of manipulating impulsivity in non-human animals is providing different levels of access to conspecifics. These preclinical models have revealed that social isolation increases impulsive responding across a wide range of tasks. The goal of the present study was to determine whether social isolation modulates time perception in pigeons by inducing more variability or a bias to underestimate the passage of time in temporal judgments. A temporal bisection task was used to characterize time perception. One group of pigeons performed the bisection following social enrichment, and the remaining half of the pigeons were tested following social isolation. Results revealed pigeons in the social isolation condition categorized a temporal stimulus sample as "long" at shorter durations than pigeons in the social enrichment condition. These data highlight the mechanism(s) thought to underlie timing-based interventions aimed at reducing impulsivity in humans. Future work should consider whether impulsivity is produced by misperceptions of time or a reduced threshold for a response.

Logarithmic encoding of ensemble time intervals

“…6), indicative of higher uncertainty, or more random guessing, in ensemble averaging in the visual domain. As random guessing would corrupt the effect we aimed to observe [79][80][81] , this factor would have obscured the underlying pattern more in the visual than in the auditory modality. To check for such a potential impact of random responses on temporal averaging, we fitted additional psychometric functions to the original response data from our visual experiment.…”

“…To check for such a potential impact of random responses on temporal averaging, we fitted additional psychometric functions to the original response data from our visual experiment. These fits used the logistic psychometric function with and without a lapse-rate parameter, as well as a mixed model-of both temporal responses, modeled by a gamma distribution, and nontemporal responses, modelled by an exponential distribution-proposed by Laude et al 81 , and finally a model with the non-temporal component from the model of Laude et al combined with the logistic psychometric function. We found that the model of Laude et al did not improve the quality of the fit sufficiently to justify the extra parameters, as evaluated using the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), and adding a lapse rate improved the AIC only slightly (average AIC: logistic with no lapse rate: 99.1, gamma with non-temporal responses: 102, logistic with non-temporal responses: 99.3, and logistic with lapse rate: 97.9).…”

Effect of Environmental Enrichment on the Brain and on Learning and Cognition by Animals

“…Spending time in an enriched environment can also affect pigeons' judgement of the passage of time. Pigeons that have spent some time in an enriched environment tend to judge that less time has passed than pigeons that were not given an enrichment experience [55]. What is the relation between the effects of housing in an enriched environment and pecking?…”

Interval Timing and Motivation are Dissociable when Interval-Initiating Responses are Discriminable from Target Responses

“…Such observations have led to the conclusion that motivation and timing are correlated, if not inseparable processes (Avlar et al, 2015;Galtress, Marshall, & Kirkpatrick, 2012;Balci, 2014): changes in motivation for an incentive necessarily affect the timing of that incentive, and vice versa. Although more recent work suggests that it is possible to computationally dissociate timing and non-timing processes (Balci, Freestone, & Gallistel, 2009;Daniels et al, 2015a, b;Laude, Daniels, & Zentall, 2016;Sanabria & Killeen, 2008), including motivation (Daniels & Sanabria, 2017a;Daniels, Overby, & Sanabria, 2018;Watterson, Mazur, & Sanabria, 2015), to our knowledge no study has directly tested whether it is possible to procedurally dissociate motivation and timing. In the present paper, we report two experiments that assess whether such a dissociation is possible.…”