Sharing and Cooperation in Pigeons History Table Of Contents History Title Page List of Figures, Tables Introduction Purpose, Method Results and Discussion General Discussion References Abstract

History

This is a Masters thesis "Submitted to the College of Arts and Sciences of West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts" by Tom Donaldson in Morgantown, West Virginia, in 1984.

From the few records I have from that period it appears that the thesis proposal was approved by Don Hake on 18 August 1981. My thesis committee consisted of my mentor, Don Hake, plus Andy Lattal, and Barry Edelstein. I got birds to use as subjects in September, and started running in October. This was the beginning of my third year as a Behavior Analysis graduate student (a "tenure track" student). I was not a particularly cooperative student, preferring to live in the lab and in bars rather than to write things up.

In a period of burnout and confusion about what I wanted from life, I took a job as a full time programmer at Valley Community Mental Health Center in May 1982. After a particularly good thesis meeting with Don on the last Thursday in July 1982, I decided to quit my job and "get with the program" when the fall session started in August. I felt good about going back to the lab, Don, and Cloyd. However, Don died the morning of Sunday, 2 August 1982, as he was beginning his morning run. Don's death was big loss to many people in many ways. He is still missed.

Andy Lattal substituted as the committee chair for my thesis, with Linda Parrott (now Linda Hayes) joining to keep a closer eye on the project and review drafts of the thesis report. I continued working as a programmer at the mental health center, and continued running birds daily until 21 June 1983. Around then I went to work with Julie Vargas on a grant to develop CAI software. After a year of putzing around with analyzing thesis data and sporadically writing up results, Julie kindly offered the use of her new Macintosh to get the job done (actually, she insisted that I get it done and over with). Without Julie's strong encouragement, I might have never bothered to get my masters degree; what a mess I was.

In 1985 I moved to the Metro DC area, where I lived and worked as a software developer until moving to Brookings, Oregon, in 2002. It has been many years since I read my thesis, or any EAB work. As far as I know, no one has ever seen this thesis outside of the folks listed on the thesis acknowledgement page, plus my old buddy in animal social behavior research, Cloyd Hyten. WVU no longer has a copy; they needed the storage space back.

This online version of my thesis report was created using Optical Character Recognition software (OCR software). I am sure that in the process of transcribing it I have introduced errors, which I will try to weed out over time. I have also corrected a few spelling errors (didn't I have a spell checker when I wrote the thesis?), and added a couple of missing references. The graphs were not very pretty to start with, and scanning them has not improved their appearance. I have done some cleanup with Adobe Photoshop, but it is laborious; I doubt that I will do much more cleanup unless I find the originals (versus the reduced ones in the bound thesis report). The formatting of the document, and other "cosmetics" and convenience features, differ from the format required by WVU at the time it was submitted. To the degree practical and reasonable, the content is the same as the original.

• Comment: Any bulleted italicized text block preceded by "Comment:" is remarks I added during transcriptions, and are not part of the original thesis. Not my favorite way of inserting comments, but easy to do in HTML.

Tom Donaldson
November, 2002