What's the use of Picture Discrimination Experiments.

The Commentaries: Some are Visual Illusions.

“…The original proposition we presented seems both innocuous and reasonable, i.e., that the explanatory power of visual category research is amplified greatly by ensuring that birds see objects found in nature in the pictures presented in category discriminations. It is dismaying to me that as I demonstrated here, Lea (2010), Lazareva (2010), and Soto and Wasserman (2010b) responded to our ideas with so many factually and logically flawed objections. I hope readers, particularly reviewers and editors, have gained a fuller understanding and appreciation for our position on the importance of correspondence between pictures and the objects.…”

“…Two commonly cited examples of well-meaning theories now thought "not even wrong" are string theory in physics (Woit, 2007) and Mead's anthropological hypotheses about adolescence (Orans, 1996); famously, each turned out to lack unique predictions. In this reply, I hope to show Lea (2010), Lazareva (2010), and Soto and Wasserman's (2010b) alternative to correspondence is factually and logically flawed, in Pauli's words, "not even wrong".…”

“…What we said was "knowledge about correspondence between pigeons' representations of pictures and real objects is crucial to understanding the results of experimental tests using only pictures" (Weisman & Spetch, 2010). Lea (2010) has claimed that pigeons and other birds mainly use single dimension solutions to recognition problems. The notion that some single feature common to pictures or sound recordings of conspecifics is generally responsible for correspondence with nature is certainly wrong.…”

“…Lea (2010) suggested that natural concepts are often signaled by only one characteristic. Jitsumori (2010, p.137) speculated, "natural objects … contain much richer information than do the man-made objects or the stimuli that vary only on a few physical dimensions" (the opposite of Lea's hypothesis and closer to our thinking).…”

Pigeons process actor-action configurations more readily than bystander-action configurations

“…These seminal papers in action recognition represent just a small part of Lea's considerable contributions toward understanding categorization, classification, and discrimination learning by animals. Employing a wide range of different stimuli and categories, his research has contributed over the years substantially to our theoretical understanding of how animals process and represent information (e.g., Lea, 1984Lea, , 2010Lea & Harrison, 1978;Lea et al, 2018;Lea, Slater, & Ryan, 1996;Osthaus, Lea, & Slater, 2005).…”