Comparative Cognition and Learning
CCS Fall Meeting 2008 Conference Submission Form

Presenter's Name (First, MI, Last)
Presenter's Institutional Affiliation    
Presenter's Email Address            

Title of Presentation or Symposium

If you want to submit a proposal for a SYMPOSIUM, please
1. Enter the names of symposium participants and a brief description of the symposium topic in the box below.
2. send a message to Michael Brown (michael.brown@villanova.edu) for additional information and instructions.

If you are submitting a proposal for an individual talk, then enter your submission in the box below as described:
Authors, Title and Abstract (Maximum of 1024 characters in the box below - about 150 words) in the exact format to appear in program.  
Line 1 - Author and Affiliation
Line 2 - Title
Line 3 and following - Abstract.  Please carefully check punctuation, spacing, and capitalization so that they conform to the examples.

Example Submissions for 10 min or 20 min talks-

Melissa Bateson (University of Newcastle)
Temporal Averaging in Foraging Starlings
Animals are universally risk-prone for variance in delay to reward, preferring an option offering a variable delay over one offering a fixed delay equal to the arithmetic mean of the delays in the variable option. A number of different functional and mechanistic models have been proposed to explain this preference. These models differ in the predictions they make regarding the value of the fixed delay at which a subject should become indifferent between a fixed and variable-delay option. I present an experiment on European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) designed to separate these models by identifying this indifference point. The data show that indifference occurs when the fixed delay is close to the harmonic mean of the delays in the variable option. This result rejects the scalar timing theory-based account of choice between delayed rewards.

Matthew J. Pizzo & Jonathon D. Crystal (University of Georgia)
Evidence for an Alternation Strategy in a Daily Time-Place Task
There has been some controversy over what type of mechanism rats use to solve a daily time-place task.  Rats (n=10) were tested twice daily in a T-maze.  Food was available at one location in the morning and at the opposite location in the afternoon.  After the rats learned to visit each location at the appropriate time, omission tests were conducted to evaluate whether the rats were utilizing time of day or an alternation strategy.  Performance on this test was significantly lower than chance.  A second manipulation involving a phase advance of the light cycle was conducted to test the alternation strategy and timing with respect to the light cycle.  There was no difference between probe and baseline performance.  These results suggest that the rats used an alternation strategy in a daily time-place task.

Ronald Weisman (Queen's University), Andrea Friedrich, Dennis Morrell, & Thomas Zentall (University of Kentucky)
Absolute Pitch: Forget About Whether Music Training Matters: What Matters is Whether You are a Mammal or a Bird
Absolute pitch perception (AP) refers to the ability to identify, classify, and memorize pitches without use of an external reference pitch. In previously published tests of AP, several species of birds and mammals were trained to sort contiguous tones into 8, 5-tone frequency ranges, based on correlations between responding to tones in each frequency range and reinforcement. Species from two avian orders (songbirds and parrots that learn complex songs and calls) had highly accurate AP in 8-range discriminations. Two mammalian species (humans and rats) had poor AP; they acquired only a crude discrimination of the lowest and highest of 8 frequency ranges. In the present experiments, pigeons (an avian species with relatively simple unlearned calls) were more similar in their frequency-range discriminations to other avian species than to mammals.

For a symposium, list the topic of the symposium and participants in the box below.   The program committee will contact you with further instructions. 

Please Place Your Submission in the Box Below, in the Format Indicated by the Examples

If there is a lab web site providing information related to this presentation and you would like the web address to be provided in the conference program, please enter the URL below:

A data projector (powerpoint projector) will be available.  Contact the program committee with questions about other AV possibilities.

You must click the submit button below to submit your presentation.  A confirmation page, showing the fields entered in this form, will appear after your information is submitted.