Categorical Perception

Parker, Amira N.; Wallis, Guy; Obergrussberger, Rainer; Siebeck, Ulrike E.

doi:10.14264/uql.2020.641

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“…Five of the six fish reached the learning criterion within 5–19 sessions (Figure 4a,b, Parker, Wallis, Obergrussberger, & Siebeck, 2020). As F2 never reached criterion (requirement of two consecutive sessions with discrimination accuracy of at least 75%) and showed no signs of improvement, it was excluded from further experimentation.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…In the first part of this experiment, fish had to discriminate S+ from morphed distractors, four, nine, and fourteen steps from S+ as well as from S− and S+ (bias control; Figure 2; Parker et al, 2020). No significant difference was found between fish in the two groups (two‐factorial mixed ANOVA: F (1,3) = 1.253, p = .34) and no interaction was found between group and morph step (two‐factorial mixed ANOVA: F (4, 12) = 0.5676, p = .69).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Categorical face perception in fish: How a fish brain warps reality to dissociate “same” from “different”

Parker

Wallis

Obergrussberger

et al. 2020

J of Comparative Neurology

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Categorical perception (CP) is the phenomenon by which a smoothly varying stimulus property undergoes a nonlinear transformation during processing in the brain. Consequently, the stimuli are perceived as belonging to distinct categories separated by a sharp boundary. Originally thought to be largely innate, the discovery of CP in tasks such as novel image discrimination has piqued the interest of cognitive scientists because it provides compelling evidence that learning can shape a category's perceptual boundaries. CP has been particularly closely studied in human face perception. In nonprimates, there is evidence for CP for sound and color discrimination, but not for image or face discrimination. Here, we investigate the potential for learned CP in a lower vertebrate, the damselfish Pomacentrus amboinensis. Specifically, we tested whether the ability of these fish to discriminate complex facial patterns tracked categorical rather than metric differences in the stimuli. We first trained the fish to discriminate sets of two facial patterns. Next, we morphed between these patterns and determined the just noticeable difference (JND) between a morph and original image. Finally, we tested for CP by analyzing the discrimination ability of the fish for pairs of JND stimuli along the spectrum of morphs between two original images. Discrimination performance was significant for the image pair straddling the boundary between categories, and chance for equivalent stimulus pairs on either side, thus producing the classic "category boundary" effect. Our results reveal how perception can be influenced in a top-down manner even in the absence of a visual cortex.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%