Abstract
Stumptailed monkeys were given a series of pattern discrimination problems of the type used in studies with humans to test Garner’s information-theoretic theory of figural goodness. Unlike humans’, the monkeys’ learning and response latency were not faster for problems involving good patterns (coming from small rotation-and-reflection equivalence sets) than for problems involving poor patterns (coming from large rotation-and-reflection equivalence sets). Like humans, the monkeys found problems involving patterns from the same equivalence set, regardless of the size of the set, to be much harder to learn than problems involving patterns from different sets. Learning was faster, the greater the number of unique elements distinguishing a pair of patterns. Effects of specific types of reflection and rotation were also analyzed. The results suggest that there are both similarities and differences in the processing of patterns by monkeys and humans, and that the processing can, at the same time, involve both whole patterns and elements or features of patterns.
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Smith, A. F.Holistic and feature-analytic aspects of multidimensional pattern recognition. Unpublished manuscript, 1976.
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This research was supported by Grant BNS76-00036 from the National Science Foundation.
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Schrier, A.M., Povar, M.L. & Schrier, J.E. Effects of goodness and other properties of patterns on discriminative performance of monkeys. Perception & Psychophysics 25, 215–220 (1979). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03202989
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03202989