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  • Title: Absolute pitch: frequency-range discriminations in pigeons (Columba livia): comparisons with zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) and humans (Homo sapiens).
    Author: Friedrich A, Zentall T, Weisman R.
    Journal: J Comp Psychol; 2007 Feb; 121(1):95-105. PubMed ID: 17324079.
    Abstract:
    Absolute pitch (AP) is the ability to classify individual pitches without an external referent. The authors compared results from pigeons (Columba livia, a nonsongbird species) with results (R. Weisman, M. Njegovan, C. Sturdy, L. Phillmore, J. Coyle, & D. Mewhort, 1998) from zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata, a songbird species) and humans (Homo sapiens) in AP tests that required classification of contiguous tones into 3 or 8 frequency ranges on the basis of correlations between the tones in each frequency range and reward. Pigeons' 3-range discriminations were similar in accuracy to those of zebra finches and humans. In the more challenging 8-range task, pigeons, like zebra finches, discriminated shifts from reward to nonreward from range to range across all 8 ranges, whereas humans discriminated only the 1st and last ranges. Taken together with previous research, the present experiments suggest that birds may have more accurate AP than mammals.
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