Department of Psychology, Keio University, Mita 2-15-45, Tokyo 108, Japan.
Anim Cogn. 2011 Nov;14(6):797-808. doi: 10.1007/s10071-011-0412-7. Epub 2011 May 10.
Birds have visual cognition as well developed as humans. Sometimes, the birds show visual discrimination similar to humans, but the birds may use different cues. Previous reports suggest that global configuration cues are salient for humans, whereas local elemental cues are salient for pigeons. I analyzed the discriminative behavior of pigeons with scrambled images because scrambled images keep the local elemental cues of the original images but lose the global configuration cues. If pigeons use local elemental cues, then, they should show transfer of discrimination from the original images to their scrambled images and also transfer from the scrambled images to their original images. In Experiment I, I trained pigeons on painting style discrimination (Japanese paintings vs. Western impressionist paintings) using either the original or scrambled images and found that the pigeons showed bidirectional transfer. In Experiment II, I trained pigeons on discrimination of "good" versus "bad" paintings using children's paintings. The birds showed poor transfer from the original images to their scrambled images and vise versa. Thus, the pigeons discriminated good and bad paintings based mostly on global configuration cues in this case. These results suggest that the pigeons use different cues for different discriminations.
鸟类的视觉认知与人类一样发达。有时，鸟类表现出与人类相似的视觉辨别能力，但它们可能使用不同的线索。之前的报告表明，整体结构线索对人类很明显，而局部元素线索对鸽子很明显。我分析了使用打乱图像的鸽子的辨别行为，因为打乱图像保留了原始图像的局部元素线索，但失去了整体结构线索。如果鸽子使用局部元素线索，那么它们应该表现出从原始图像到其打乱图像的辨别转移，以及从打乱图像到其原始图像的辨别转移。在实验 I 中，我使用原始图像或打乱图像训练鸽子进行绘画风格辨别（日本画与西方印象派绘画），发现鸽子表现出双向转移。在实验 II 中，我训练鸽子进行“好”画与“坏”画的辨别，使用儿童画。结果发现，鸽子从原始图像到其打乱图像的转移和反之亦然的转移都很差。因此，在这种情况下，鸽子主要根据全局结构线索来辨别好坏画。这些结果表明，鸽子在不同的辨别中使用不同的线索。
