Talk:Autoshaping

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Well - sign tracking and autoshaping are actually entirely different things. Autoshaping is a little like sign tracking, maybe, in that it is based off of the "CS", but it would be just as improper to call it that as it would be to call it goal tracking. Autoshaping, neither, has anything specifically to do with pigeons. Autoshaping refers to that pigeons automatically peck as a prefeeding response to food, so when presented with a discriminitive stimulus for feeding, which may or may not be light (therefore, it may be time, environmental ques, handling, etc.), pigeons peck. The significance of autoshaping does not lie in the kind of classical conditioning reward-based Pavolovian pigeon experiment, like the one mentioned in the article, though. The significance is to stimulus/response pairing. If a pigeon pecks a key when presented with food, is it pecking the key because it is rewarded, or because pecking is a natural prefeeding response? The sooner would imply expetancy, but it has been disproven many times. The latter would imply autoshaping, the feed-forward explanation.