Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, The University of Iowa.
J Exp Psychol Anim Learn Cogn. 2021 Oct;47(4):455-463. doi: 10.1037/xan0000297. Epub 2021 Sep 13.
Research on same-different categorization has shown that mastery of tasks of this kind can be strongly affected by the number of items in the training arrays-for both humans and nonhuman animals. Evidence for two-item same-different categorization in pigeons is decidedly mixed: although some investigations have succeeded, others have failed. To date, no research has documented successful conditional same-different categorization using just two items, nor has research explored how pigeons' responses in this paradigm might be influenced by perceptual characteristics of the training stimuli. Through a series of methodological modifications, we provide the first successful documentation that pigeons can perform two-item conditional same-different categorization to a high degree of accuracy; further, they can do so without the support of item repetition. We also show for the first time that the perceptual disparity between the items in pairs of different stimuli plays a key part in pigeons' same-different categorization performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
对相同-不同分类的研究表明，对于人类和非人类动物来说，这种任务的掌握可以受到训练数组中项目数量的强烈影响。鸽子的两项目相同-不同分类的证据是混合的：尽管一些研究取得了成功，但其他研究却失败了。迄今为止，没有研究记录使用仅仅两个项目就能成功进行条件相同-不同分类，也没有研究探讨鸽子在这种范式中的反应如何受到训练刺激的感知特征的影响。通过一系列方法学的修改，我们首次成功地证明了鸽子可以非常准确地进行两项目条件相同-不同分类；此外，它们可以在没有项目重复的情况下做到这一点。我们还首次表明，不同刺激对中项目之间的感知差异在鸽子的相同-不同分类表现中起着关键作用。
