Qadri Muhammad A J, Asen Yael, Cook Robert G
Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA.
J Vis. 2014 May 30;14(5):16. doi: 10.1167/14.5.16.
Recognizing and categorizing behavior is essential for all animals. The visual and cognitive mechanisms underlying such action discriminations are not well understood, especially in nonhuman animals. To identify the visual bases of action discriminations, four pigeons were tested in a go/no-go procedure to examine the contribution of different visual features in a discrimination of walking and running actions by different digital animal models. Two different tests with point-light displays derived from studies of human biological motion failed to support transfer of the learned action discrimination from fully figured models. Tests with silhouettes, contours, and the selective deletion or occlusion of different parts of the models indicated that information about the global motions of the entire model was critical to the discrimination. This outcome, along with earlier results, suggests that the pigeons’ discrimination of these locomotive actions involved a generalized categorization of the sequence of configural poses. Because the motor systems for locomotion and flying in pigeons share little in common with quadruped motions, the pigeons’ discrimination of these behaviors creates problems for motor theories of action recognition based on mirror neurons or related notions of embodied cognition. It suggests instead that more general motion and shape mechanisms are sufficient for making such discriminations, at least in birds.
识别和分类行为对所有动物来说都是至关重要的。这种行为辨别背后的视觉和认知机制尚未得到充分理解，尤其是在非人类动物中。为了确定行为辨别的视觉基础，对四只鸽子进行了“是/否”程序测试，以检验不同视觉特征在区分不同数字动物模型的行走和奔跑动作中的作用。两项源自对人类生物运动研究的点光显示测试未能支持将所学的行为辨别从完整图形模型进行迁移。对模型轮廓、外形以及不同部分的选择性删除或遮挡进行的测试表明，整个模型的全局运动信息对于辨别至关重要。这一结果与早期结果表明，鸽子对这些运动行为的辨别涉及对构型姿势序列的广义分类。由于鸽子的运动和飞行运动系统与四足动物的运动几乎没有共同之处，鸽子对这些行为的辨别给基于镜像神经元或相关具身认知概念的动作识别运动理论带来了问题。相反，这表明至少在鸟类中，更一般的运动和形状机制足以进行此类辨别。
