Peissig Jessie J, Kirkpatrick Kimberly, Young Michael E, Wasserman Edward E, Biederman Irving
Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA.
J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process. 2006 Oct;32(4):419-30. doi: 10.1037/0097-7403.32.4.419.
The authors investigated the pigeon's ability to generalize object discrimination performance to smaller and larger versions of trained objects. In Experiment 1, they taught pigeons with line drawings of multipart objects and later tested the birds with both larger and smaller drawings. The pigeons exhibited significant generalization to new sizes, although they did show systematic performance decrements as the new size deviated from the original. In Experiment 2, the authors tested both linear and exponential size changes of computer-rendered basic shapes to determine which size transformation produced equivalent performance for size increases and decreases. Performance was more consistent with logarithmic than with linear scaling of size. This finding was supported in Experiment 3. Overall, the experiments suggest that the pigeon encodes size as a feature of objects and that the representation of size is most likely logarithmic.
作者们研究了鸽子将物体辨别表现推广到训练物体的更大和更小版本上的能力。在实验1中，他们用多部分物体的线条图对鸽子进行训练，之后用更大和更小的图对这些鸽子进行测试。鸽子对新尺寸表现出了显著的推广能力，尽管随着新尺寸与原始尺寸的偏差，它们的表现确实出现了系统性下降。在实验2中，作者们测试了计算机渲染的基本形状的线性和指数尺寸变化，以确定哪种尺寸变换在尺寸增加和减少时产生等效表现。表现与尺寸的对数缩放比与线性缩放更一致。这一发现在实验3中得到了支持。总体而言，这些实验表明鸽子将尺寸编码为物体的一个特征，并且尺寸的表征很可能是对数形式的。
