Teaching pigeons an abstract relational rule: Insideness

Herrnstein, R. J.; Vaughan, William; Mumford, David; Kosslyn, Stephen M.

doi:10.3758/bf03208074

Cited by 61 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Results unambiguously demonstrated that the baboons could indeed process 'above' and 'below' relation between these two classes of visual objects. Altogether, this study complements the previous findings on pigeons (Herrnstein et al, 1989;Kirkpatrick-Steger and Wasserman, 1996) and chimpanzees (Hopkins and Morris, 1989), and it suggests that animals may form conceptual representations of 'above' and 'below' spatial relations (see also Dépy et al, 1998 for the demonstration that baboons can evaluate other spatial relations, such as distances). This ability appears to be present in monkeys, even though they have no tools to label them.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

“…However, very few studies, are available on the mastery by animals of categorical spatial relations, such as the 'above/below' or 'inside/outside' relations, in a purely perceptual discrimination task. Herrnstein et al (1989) showed that pigeons were unable to categorize stimuli composed of a closed curved and a dot, depending on whether the dot was inside or outside the curve. It was only after an effortful training procedure, during which the inside color of the curve was manipulated, that pigeons displayed a limited ability to sort novel curves according to the 'inside-outside' location of the dot.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Processing of above/below categorical spatial relations by baboons (Papio papio)

Dépy¹,

Fagot

Vauclair

1999

Behavioural Processes

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Three video-formatted experiments investigated the categorization of 'above' and 'below' spatial relations in baboons (Papio papio). Using an identity matching-to-sample task, six baboons correctly matched line -dot stimuli based on the 'above' or 'below' location of the dot relative to the line (Experiment 1). Positive transfer of performance was then observed when the line-dot distance depicted in the sample stimulus differed from that of the two comparison stimuli (Experiment 2). Using a go/nogo procedure, two baboons were further trained to discriminate whether a 'B' character was displayed 'above' or 'below' a '3' character (Experiment 3). After training, a positive transfer of performance was observed with the same type of stimuli depicted in different type fonts. Altogether, these results suggest that baboons may form conceptual representations of 'above' and 'below' spatial relations, and categorize visual forms on that basis.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing of above/below categorical spatial relations by baboons (Papio papio)

Dépy¹,

Fagot

Vauclair

1999

Behavioural Processes

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“…As in Herrnstein et al (1989), our pigeons successfully mastered a figure-ground discrimination. But, because we used a two-alternative forced-choice task rather than a go/no-go task, we could directly compare the pigeons' report responses on figure trials and on background trials.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 68%

“…More closely related to figure-ground segregation was a study by Herrnstein, Vaughan, Mumford, and Kosslyn (1989), who presented pigeons with a closed white outline filled with a bright red interior on a black background. A white dot could be placed either inside or outside the white outline.…”

Section: University Of Iowa Iowa City Iowamentioning

confidence: 99%

Figure-ground assignment in pigeons: Evidence for a figural benefit

Lazareva

Castro

Vecera

et al. 2006

Perception & Psychophysics

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“…Therefore, maybe abstract knowledge has to be developed through some alternative learning process, possibly involving explicit rules. For example, Herrnstein et al (1989) found that pigeons were unable to learn a discrimination task that involved a relational feature, which suggests that it is not possible to develop abstract knowledge through associative learning. Wills and Mackintosh (1998) observed that if their participants adopted an explicit rule in an associative learning task they could generalize in a way inconsistent with co-occurrence statistics.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Two types of thought: Evidence from aphasia

Davidoff

2005

Behav Brain Sci

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Abstract:The distinction between rules and similarity is central to our understanding of much of cognitive psychology. Two aspects of existing research have motivated the present work. First, in different cognitive psychology areas we typically see different conceptions of rules and similarity; for example, rules in language appear to be of a different kind compared to rules in categorization. Second, rules processes are typically modeled as separate from similarity ones; for example, in a learning experiment, rules and similarity influences would be described on the basis of separate models. In the present article, I assume that the rules versus similarity distinction can be understood in the same way in learning, reasoning, categorization, and language, and that a unified model for rules and similarity is appropriate. A rules process is considered to be a similarity one where only a single or a small subset of an object's properties are involved. Hence, rules and overall similarity operations are extremes in a single continuum of similarity operations. It is argued that this viewpoint allows adequate coverage of theory and empirical findings in learning, reasoning, categorization, and language, and also a reassessment of the objectives in research on rules versus similarity.Keywords: categorization; cognitive explanation; language; learning; reasoning; rules; similarity Emmanuel Pothos received his D.Phil. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford in 1998. Since then he has been a lecturer of psychology at the University of Wales at Bangor and at the University of Edinburgh; he is currently at the University of Crete. His research activity includes computational models in unsupervised categorization and statistical methods for disambiguating rules and similarity in learning. Additionally, he is looking at applications of learning models in the study of addictive behavior. A focal point of his work is the a priori comparability of theoretical accounts and explanatory concepts in cognitive psychology.partly because they uniquely have in common a particular set of properties or features, as research in basic level categorization and spontaneous classification shows (Pothos & Chater 2002;Rosch & Mervis 1975). I postulate that the object properties relevant in deciding how to categorize it amongst a number of candidate categories are the properties uniquely common to the instances of each category (cf. Aha & Goldstone 1992). For example, in order to decide whether my car keys are a member of the category 'things to take out of my house when it is on fire," I will have to consider only whether car keys match the uniquely common properties of the other members of that category ("credit cards," "my cat," "my university diploma") (Barsalou 1991). Note that the present proposal does not involve any commitment about the form of features or properties (cf. Marr 1982). We simply require that at some level it is possible to represent objects in terms of discrete entities (perceptual features, abstract proper...

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Teaching pigeons an abstract relational rule: Insideness

Cited by 61 publications

References 10 publications

Processing of above/below categorical spatial relations by baboons (Papio papio)

Processing of above/below categorical spatial relations by baboons (Papio papio)

Figure-ground assignment in pigeons: Evidence for a figural benefit

Two types of thought: Evidence from aphasia

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