Aaron Smith

Aaron has been a member of the Comparative Cognition Lab since 2013. He received his bachelor’s degree from Kansas State University working in Dr. Kim Kirkpatrick’s lab. Aaron has been working on several projects including pigeons’ performance on the balloon task in which up to 5 responses to one key can be redeemed with pellets when pecking the “cash-out” key. When each peck is signaled by a different color, some pigeons learn to peck 5 times before cashing out. He has also been involved in experiments on pigeons’ suboptimal choice behavior demonstrating that the frequency of a conditioned reinforcer is relatively unimportant, primarily its ability to predict reinforcement.