Recognition of moving video images of conspecifics by pigeons: Effects of individuals, static and dynamic motion cues, and movement

Abstract

Two groups of pigeons were trained with a go/no-go proeedure to diseriminate video Images of eonspecifies based on the individuals or else on their aetions. Both groups showed rapid aequisition, and the diserimination transferred to new seenes in Experiment 1 and to static seenes in Experiment 2, In Experiment 3, experimentally naive pigeons were trained to diseriminate video Images of particular birds showing different aetions. Transfer to novel seenes, including a new bird and a new motion, revealed the dominanee of motion as a eue to diseriminate video Images, In Experiment 4, the pigeons trained to diseriminate video seenes of 2 pigeons showing a variety of activities sueeessfully reeognized these stimuli regardless of whether the video was played forward or baekward, and transferred the diserimination to still seenes. The findings suggest that pigeons' diserimination ofvideo images is primarily based on information that is invariant aeross statie and dynamic eonditions.Individual recognition is of great ecological relevance to animals. It is important for animals to respond differentially and appropriately to their social partners and to other individuals. There is little or no doubt that the ability to recognize individuals is based on perceptual and cognitive factors and on species-typical social interactive behaviors. Still or moving pictures of conspecifics have been used to study cognition and social behaviors in apes

Successive two-item same-different discrimination and concept learning by pigeons

“…They found that coherent videos supported better discrimination than did randomized one. We had thought a similar effect might occur here, but clearly did not (see Jitsumori et al, 1999 for a similar result involving forward and backward videos). Such results indicate that the motion within the video's content was not critical to the pigeons.…”

The discrimination of natural movement by budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulates) and pigeons (Columba livia).

“…Because the postures of a demonstrator who is pecking will differ from those of a demonstrator who is walking, it is impossible to know whether the discrimination was based on static or dynamic cues. Results described by Jitsumori, Natori, and Okuyama (1999) lend support to the first of these possibilities. The design of one of the reported experiments was similar to that used by Dittrich et al, except that the video clips were of demonstrators engaged in either key pecking or turning in circles.…”

Discrimination of coherent and incoherent motion by pigeons: An investigation using a same-different motion discrimination task

“…More recently, pigeons have been found to categorize different video images of conspecifics based on their actions, such as pecking, circling, pacing, and walking (e.g., Dittrich et al, 1998;Jitsumori et al, 1999). Goto and Lea (2003) found that pigeons can ଝ This research was supported by Grant 13610076 from the Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture to M.J. We thank Tomoyuki Oya and Tomoya Sudo for assistance in conducting the research and Mitsuo Hanada for programming the motion stimuli.…”