Comparing performance of humans and pigeons in rule-based visual categorization tasks

Berg, Mark E.; Ward, Matthew K.; Dai, Zhijie; Arantes, Joana; Grace, Randolph C.

doi:10.1016/j.lmot.2013.11.001

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 39 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…For example, it is possible that pigeons do posses a rule-based mechanism; but, unlike primates, they do not perceive the dimensions of line width and orientation used by Smith et al ( 2011 ) as separable and thus cannot selectively attend to them. Indeed, some evidence suggests that these dimensions might interact for pigeons (Berg and Grace, 2011 ; Berg et al, 2014 ); so, an urgent issue is to determine whether such perceptual interactions do exist using traditional tests of separability adapted to animal research (e.g., Blough, 1988 ; Soto and Wasserman, 2010c , 2011 ) or, better still, adapting tests of separability that control for the influence of non-perceptual factors ( Ashby and Soto, in press ; Soto et al, 2014 ).…”

Section: The Evolution Of Mechanisms Of Object Recognition In Vertebrmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One possibility is that pigeons do not deploy selective attention in the same way as primates (Smith et al, 2012a ) or that they do not perceive any visual dimensions independently, but process all stimuli holistically (Berg et al, 2014 ). These ideas are in line with studies of compound generalization in pigeon associative learning, which suggest that pigeons process visual stimulus compounds as configurations rather than as the simple sum of their component elements (e.g., Rescorla and Coldwell, 1995 ; Aydin and Pearce, 1997 ), whereas people show much more elemental processing in analogous tests (e.g., Collins and Shanks, 2006 ; Soto et al, 2009 ).…”

Section: The Evolution Of Mechanisms Of Object Recognition In Vertebrmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Mechanisms of object recognition: what we have learned from pigeons

Soto

Wasserman

2014

Front. Neural Circuits

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Behavioral studies of object recognition in pigeons have been conducted for 50 years, yielding a large body of data. Recent work has been directed toward synthesizing this evidence and understanding the visual, associative, and cognitive mechanisms that are involved. The outcome is that pigeons are likely to be the non-primate species for which the computational mechanisms of object recognition are best understood. Here, we review this research and suggest that a core set of mechanisms for object recognition might be present in all vertebrates, including pigeons and people, making pigeons an excellent candidate model to study the neural mechanisms of object recognition. Behavioral and computational evidence suggests that error-driven learning participates in object category learning by pigeons and people, and recent neuroscientific research suggests that the basal ganglia, which are homologous in these species, may implement error-driven learning of stimulus-response associations. Furthermore, learning of abstract category representations can be observed in pigeons and other vertebrates. Finally, there is evidence that feedforward visual processing, a central mechanism in models of object recognition in the primate ventral stream, plays a role in object recognition by pigeons. We also highlight differences between pigeons and people in object recognition abilities, and propose candidate adaptive specializations which may explain them, such as holistic face processing and rule-based category learning in primates. From a modern comparative perspective, such specializations are to be expected regardless of the model species under study. The fact that we have a good idea of which aspects of object recognition differ in people and pigeons should be seen as an advantage over other animal models. From this perspective, we suggest that there is much to learn about human object recognition from studying the “simple” brains of pigeons.

show abstract

Section: The Evolution Of Mechanisms Of Object Recognition In Vertebrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Evolution Of Mechanisms Of Object Recognition In Vertebrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mechanisms of object recognition: what we have learned from pigeons

Soto

Wasserman

2014

Front. Neural Circuits

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In a review, Smith et al (2012b) also described fundamental differences in the categorization abilities of humans, monkeys and pigeons, with the former two learning one-dimensional rule-based tasks more quickly than two-dimensional information-integrated tasks, while pigeons learned both equally fast. Humans were also faster and chose more accurately than pigeons in categorization tasks that were facilitated by selective attention (Berg et al 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A wide range of experiments has already been performed on categorization abilities of humans, primates and birds (for a review see Smith et al 2012a, b;Smith and Minda 1998;Berg et al 2014). Birds were the first non-human animals to be assessed in this respect (e.g., Lubow 1974;Aust and Huber 2001;Cook and Smith 2006;Berankova et al 2014;Castro and Wasserman 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Irrespective of size, scales, color or body shape, all fish are just fish: object categorization in the gray bamboo shark Chiloscyllium griseum

Schluessel

Duengen

2014

Anim Cogn

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Object categorization is an important cognitive adaptation, quickly providing an animal with relevant and potentially life-saving information. It can be defined as the process whereby objects that are not the same, are nonetheless grouped together according to some defining feature(s) and responded to as if they were the same. In this way, knowledge about one object, behavior or situation can be extrapolated onto another without much cost and effort. Many vertebrates including humans, monkeys, birds and teleosts have been shown to be able to categorize, with abilities varying between species and tasks. This study assessed object categorization skills in the gray bamboo shark Chiloscyllium griseum. Sharks learned to distinguish between the two categories, 'fish' versus 'snail' independently of image features and image type, i.e., black and white drawings, photographs, comics or negative images. Transfer tests indicated that sharks predominantly focused on and categorized the positive stimulus, while disregarding the negative stimulus.

show abstract

“…Such experiments could provide crucial evidence that zebra finches do not perceive human speech sounds as unitary wholes (i.e., exemplars), but are able to analytically deconstruct such sounds into different components. Based on visual categorization experiments, it has been suggested that the ability to analyze stimuli that differ along multiple dimensions and categorize them along different dimensions is a recent evolutionary development restricted to primates ( Berg and Grace, 2011 ; Berg et al, 2014 ; Smith et al, 2011 , 2012 ). As zebra finches are one of the most important models for comparative studies for understanding the evolution of speech perception and language, it is fundamental that we rigorously test whether this assumption is also valid for acoustic categorization (and specifically for human speech sound categorization) in order to thoroughly understand the similarities and differences in how zebra finches perceive speech sounds compared to humans.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A general auditory bias for handling speaker variability in speech? Evidence in humans and songbirds

et al. 2015

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Different speakers produce the same speech sound differently, yet listeners are still able to reliably identify the speech sound. How listeners can adjust their perception to compensate for speaker differences in speech, and whether these compensatory processes are unique only to humans, is still not fully understood. In this study we compare the ability of humans and zebra finches to categorize vowels despite speaker variation in speech in order to test the hypothesis that accommodating speaker and gender differences in isolated vowels can be achieved without prior experience with speaker-related variability. Using a behavioral Go/No-go task and identical stimuli, we compared Australian English adults’ (naïve to Dutch) and zebra finches’ (naïve to human speech) ability to categorize / I/ and /ε/ vowels of an novel Dutch speaker after learning to discriminate those vowels from only one other speaker. Experiments 1 and 2 presented vowels of two speakers interspersed or blocked, respectively. Results demonstrate that categorization of vowels is possible without prior exposure to speaker-related variability in speech for zebra finches, and in non-native vowel categories for humans. Therefore, this study is the first to provide evidence for what might be a species-shared auditory bias that may supersede speaker-related information during vowel categorization. It additionally provides behavioral evidence contradicting a prior hypothesis that accommodation of speaker differences is achieved via the use of formant ratios. Therefore, investigations of alternative accounts of vowel normalization that incorporate the possibility of an auditory bias for disregarding inter-speaker variability are warranted.

show abstract

Comparing performance of humans and pigeons in rule-based visual categorization tasks

Cited by 5 publications

References 39 publications

Mechanisms of object recognition: what we have learned from pigeons

Mechanisms of object recognition: what we have learned from pigeons

Irrespective of size, scales, color or body shape, all fish are just fish: object categorization in the gray bamboo shark Chiloscyllium griseum

A general auditory bias for handling speaker variability in speech? Evidence in humans and songbirds

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About