Scene gist categorization by pigeons.

Abstract

Scene gist categorization in humans is rapid, accurate, and tuned to the fundamental statistical regularities in the visual world. However, no studies have investigated whether scene gist categorization is a general process shared across species, or whether it may be influenced by species-specific adaptive specializations relying on specific low-level scene statistical regularities of the environment. Although pigeons form many types of categorical judgments, little research has examined pigeons' scene categorization, and no studies have examined pigeons' ability to do so rapidly. In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained to discriminate between either two basic-level categories (beach vs. mountain) or a superordinate level natural versus a man-made scene category distinction (beach vs. street).The birds successfully learned both tasks to a high degree of accuracy, and transferred their discrimination to novel images. Furthermore, the pigeons successfully discriminated stimuli presented in the .2-.35 s duration range. This indicates that pigeons, a highly divergent species from humans, are also capable of rapid scene categorization, but that they require longer stimulus durations than humans, who can successfully categorize scenes with durations of .027 s or less. Experiment 2 examined whether pigeons make use of complex statistical regularities during scene gist categorization across multiple viewpoints. Pigeons were trained with the two natural categories from Experiment 1 (beach vs. mountain) with zenith (90°), bird's eye (45°), and terrestrial (0°) viewpoints. A sizable portion of the variability in pigeon categorization performance was explained by the systematic variation in scene category-specific statistical regularities, which has also been found with human scene categorization performance. In sum, the current study suggests that rapid scene categorization is a process that is shared across pigeons and humans, but shows a degree of adaptive specialization.

The extraction of natural scene gist in visual crowding

“…Although the survival of high-level information under crowding has also been found with stimuli of words 22 , 23 and digital numbers 26 , their stimuli were presented at only half of the eccentricity of our study and even less than half of the eccentricity of studies using faces and social actions as stimuli 3 , 24 , 62 . Thus, the present study together with others 36 , 48 , 60 , 63 seems to indicate the specificity of scene gist in visual processing, probably like the specificity of faces in visual processing 54 . Brain imaging studies have shown that the contextual information in scenes consistently activates the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and retrosplenial cortex (RSC) 65 – 69 , suggesting a possible gist-specific pathway involving PPA and ROC for the perception of scene gist.…”

“…Support for this proposal comes from studies showing that human can extract facial expression 24 , 25 , social action 62 and scene gist (the current study) under crowding. Furthermore, rapid categorization of scene gist can even be completed by pigeons 63 . This cross-species consistency provides further support for the idea that rapid representation of scene gist is an adaptive behavior.…”

Comparing rapid scene categorization of aerial and terrestrial views: A new perspective on scene gist

“…Related to this, it is important to acknowledge that the results we have found are, as in all studies of categorization, determined to a certain degree by the diagnosticity of the information available in our scenes for the specific category sets we used. A good example of this is the fact that a follow-up study to the current experiments, done with pigeons (Kirkpatrick, Sears, Hansen, & Loschky, 2014), did a similar imagestatistical analysis to that reported in Experiment 1 and, contrary to the results of the current study, showed greater scene-category discrimination for aerial views than terrestrial views. However, that experiment only included two scene categories: coasts and mountains.…”

Mechanisms of object recognition: what we have learned from pigeons

“…Pigeons are capable of learning categories comprising natural objects (Herrnstein and Loveland, 1964 ; Herrnstein et al, 1976 ; Herrnstein and De Villiers, 1980 ; Bhatt et al, 1988 ; Aust and Huber, 2001 , 2002 ) human-made objects (Bhatt et al, 1988 ; Wasserman et al, 1988 ; Lazareva et al, 2004 , 2006 ), scene gist (Kirkpatrick et al, 2014 ), cartoons (Matsukawa et al, 2004 ), human face identity (Soto and Wasserman, 2011 ), gender (Troje et al, 1999 ; Huber et al, 2000 ) and emotional expression (Jitsumori and Yoshihara, 1997 ), and even paintings from different artists (Watanabe et al, 1995 ; Watanabe, 2001 ).…”

“…Still, the evidence suggests a specialized mechanism for “holistic” face processing in people and other primates, which is not present in birds. It is also likely that birds have evolved specialized mechanisms of visual categorization; for example, flight might have had an important impact on birds’ evolved ability to categorize scenes from different perspectives (Kirkpatrick et al, 2014 ).…”