Categorization of birds, mammals, and chimeras by pigeons

Identifying critical features that control categorization of complex polymorphous pictures by animals remains a challenging and important problem. Toward this goal, experiments were conducted to isolate the properties controlling the categorization of two pictorial categories by pigeons. Pigeons were trained in a go/no-go task to categorize black and white line drawings of birds and mammals. They were then tested with a variety of familiar and novel exemplars of these categories to examine the features controlling this categorization. These tests suggested the pigeons were segregating and using the principal axis of orientation of the animal figures as the primary means of discriminating each category, although other categorical and item-specific cues were likely involved. This perceptual/cognitive reduction of the categorical stimulus space to a few visual features or dimensions is likely a characteristic of this species’ processing of complex pictorial discrimination problems and is a critical property for theoretical accounts of this behavior.

► Visual cues controlling bird/mammal categorization by pigeons were specified.
► Body orientation cues were most important, but others contributed.
► Pigeons learn by feature extraction and item-specific memorization.
► Relations to human conceptual behavior are discussed.