Authors: Ulrike Aust Ludwig Huber
Publish Date: 2009/07/11
Volume: 13, Issue: 2, Pages: 207-218
Abstract
Understanding the relation between objects and their pictures at a level beyond mere feature discrimination is by no means a trivial cognitive ability and support of this is still weak in nonhuman species Here we report evidence of representational insight in pigeons Responding to pictures of human body parts was compared in birds that had extensive preexperience with live humans and in birds that had never seen any human heads In a twoalternative forcedchoice procedure the pigeons were trained to discriminate between pictures of either handless or headless humans and nonhumans On test the birds had to choose i between body parts they had already seen in training and the parts that had been missing ii between previously seen parts and arbitrary skin patches and iii between previously missing parts and skin patches Only the pigeons that lacked experience with real heads and were trained with pictures of headless humans failed to show a significant preference for pictures of missing parts ie heads over arbitrary skin patches This demonstrates the importance of individual experience with the real 3Dreferents of pictures for classification of the latter and is thereby evidence of representational insightThe research was supported by the Austrian Science Foundation through Grant V3B03 to Ulrike Aust and Grant P19574B03 to Ludwig Huber Thanks are due to Michael Steurer for developing all necessary computer software and for servicing the technical equipment and to Johanna Kramer and Katharina Kramer for their assistance in the pigeon laboratory Finally we wish to thank Anna Wilkinson and Michael Steurer for valuable comments and discussion
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