La discrimination visuelle de formes complexes chez le merle, Turdus merula (L.)

An Experimental Study of Prey‐attack Behavior in the European Blackbird Turdus m. merula L

“…This type of investigatory response, which was transitory in nature, was apparently prompted by visual stimuli and seemed to have the function of obtaining additional information about the prey item. The blackbird has chromatic vision (ALTEVOGT 1953), a very fine perception of form (LABIALE 1977), and high visual acuity (DONNER 1951). The underlying assumption of the experiments involving ornamented coleopterans was that if an insect's markings or prominent structures have a deflective/directive function, first attack should be oriented to the novel feature.…”

Failure of visual prototype learning in the pigeon

“…This has included the concepts of a human (Herrnstein et al, 1976;Malott & Siddall, 1972;Siegel & Honig, 1970), a pigeon (poole & Lander, 1971), of a fish (Herrnstein & de Villiers, 1980), an oak leaf (Cerella, 1979), a man-made object (Lubow, 1974), and so on. In addition to discriminations based on such "natural concepts," birds have successfully discriminated complex visual shapes (Ferraro & Grishman, 1972;Hrycenko & Harwood, 1980;Labiale, 1979), symmetry (Delius & Habers, 1978), and the letter "A" (Morgan, Fitch, Holman, & Lea, 1976). These studies suggest that birds may be able to form visual concepts comparable to those of humans.…”