Wills A J, Lea Stephen E G, Leaver Lisa A, Osthaus Britta, Ryan Catriona M E, Suret Mark B, Bryant Catherine M L, Chapman Sue J A, Millar Louise
University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QG, United Kingdom.
J Comp Psychol. 2009 Nov;123(4):391-405. doi: 10.1037/a0016216.
Pigeons (Columba livia), gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis), and undergraduates (Homo sapiens) learned discrimination tasks involving multiple mutually redundant dimensions. First, pigeons and undergraduates learned conditional discriminations between stimuli composed of three spatially separated dimensions, after first learning to discriminate the individual elements of the stimuli. When subsequently tested with stimuli in which one of the dimensions took an anomalous value, the majority of both species categorized test stimuli by their overall similarity to training stimuli. However some individuals of both species categorized them according to a single dimension. In a second set of experiments, squirrels, pigeons, and undergraduates learned go/no-go discriminations using multiple simultaneous presentations of stimuli composed of three spatially integrated, highly salient dimensions. The tendency to categorize test stimuli including anomalous dimension values unidimensionally was higher than in the first set of experiments and did not differ significantly between species. The authors conclude that unidimensional categorization of multidimensional stimuli is not diagnostic for analytic cognitive processing, and that any differences between human's and pigeons' behavior in such tasks are not due to special features of avian visual cognition.
鸽子（家鸽）、灰松鼠（北美灰松鼠）和大学生（智人）学习了涉及多个相互冗余维度的辨别任务。首先，鸽子和大学生在学会辨别刺激的各个元素后，学习由三个空间分离维度组成的刺激之间的条件辨别。当随后用其中一个维度取异常值的刺激进行测试时，两个物种的大多数个体根据测试刺激与训练刺激的总体相似性对其进行分类。然而，两个物种中的一些个体根据单一维度对它们进行分类。在第二组实验中，松鼠、鸽子和大学生使用由三个空间整合、高度突出维度组成的刺激的多个同时呈现来学习“是/否”辨别。对包括异常维度值的测试刺激进行单维分类的倾向高于第一组实验，并且在物种之间没有显著差异。作者得出结论，多维刺激的单维分类对于分析性认知加工并无诊断意义，并且人类和鸽子在此类任务中的行为差异并非由于鸟类视觉认知的特殊特征所致。
