Tufts University, Department of Psychology, USA.
University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, USA.
Cognition. 2019 Feb;183:256-268. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.11.011. Epub 2018 Nov 30.
Categorization is an essential cognitive process useful for transferring knowledge from previous experience to novel situations. The mechanisms by which trained categorization behavior extends to novel stimuli, especially in animals, are insufficiently understood. To understand how pigeons learn and transfer category membership, seven pigeons were trained to classify controlled, bi-dimensional stimuli in a two-alternative forced-choice task. Following either dimensional, rule-based (RB) or information integration (II) training, tests were conducted focusing on the "analogical" extension of the learned discrimination to novel regions of the stimulus space (Casale, Roeder, & Ashby, 2012). The pigeons' results mirrored those from human and non-human primates evaluated using the same analogical task structure, training and testing: the pigeons transferred their discriminative behavior to the new extended values following RB training, but not after II training. Further experiments evaluating rule-based models and association-based models suggested the pigeons use dimensions and associations to learn the task and mediate transfer to stimuli within the novel region of the parametric stimulus space.
分类是一种重要的认知过程，有助于将知识从先前的经验转移到新的情境中。对于受过训练的分类行为如何扩展到新的刺激，特别是在动物中，其机制还没有得到充分的理解。为了了解鸽子如何学习和转移类别成员身份，七只鸽子接受了在二选一强制选择任务中对控制的二维刺激进行分类的训练。在基于规则（RB）或信息整合（II）的训练之后，进行了侧重于将所学的辨别力“类推”到刺激空间的新区域的测试（Casale、Roeder 和 Ashby，2012）。鸽子的结果与使用相同类推任务结构、训练和测试的人类和非人类灵长类动物的结果相似：鸽子在 RB 训练后将其辨别行为转移到新的扩展值，而在 II 训练后则不能。进一步评估基于规则的模型和基于关联的模型的实验表明，鸽子使用维度和关联来学习任务，并在参数刺激空间的新区域内的刺激中进行中介转移。
