Wasserman Edward A, Turner Brandon M, Güntürkün Onur
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA.
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
Neurosci Insights. 2024 Feb 28;19:26331055241235918. doi: 10.1177/26331055241235918. eCollection 2024.
Over the past 30 years, behavioral, computational, and neuroscientific investigations have yielded fresh insights into how pigeons adapt to the diverse complexities of their visual world. A prime area of interest has been how pigeons categorize the innumerable individual stimuli they encounter. Most studies involve either photorealistic representations of actual objects thus affording the virtue of being naturalistic, or highly artificial stimuli thus affording the virtue of being experimentally manipulable. Together those studies have revealed the pigeon to be a prodigious classifier of both naturalistic and artificial visual stimuli. In each case, new computational models suggest that elementary associative learning lies at the root of the pigeon's category learning and generalization. In addition, ongoing computational and neuroscientific investigations suggest how naturalistic and artificial stimuli may be processed along the pigeon's visual pathway. Given the pigeon's availability and affordability, there are compelling reasons for this animal model to gain increasing prominence in contemporary neuroscientific research.
在过去30年里，行为学、计算学和神经科学研究对鸽子如何适应其视觉世界的各种复杂性有了新的见解。一个主要的研究领域是鸽子如何对它们遇到的无数个体刺激进行分类。大多数研究要么涉及实际物体的逼真呈现，从而具有自然主义的优点，要么涉及高度人工化的刺激，从而具有实验可操作性的优点。这些研究共同表明，鸽子是自然主义和人工视觉刺激的惊人分类者。在每种情况下，新的计算模型都表明，基本的联想学习是鸽子类别学习和泛化的根源。此外，正在进行的计算和神经科学研究表明了自然主义和人工刺激可能如何在鸽子的视觉通路中得到处理。鉴于鸽子易于获取且成本低廉，这种动物模型在当代神经科学研究中越来越受关注是有充分理由的。
