Abstract
Understanding the relation between objects and their pictures at a level beyond mere feature discrimination is by no means a trivial cognitive ability, and support of this is still weak in nonhuman species. Here, we report evidence of representational insight in pigeons. Responding to pictures of human body parts was compared in birds that had extensive pre-experience with live humans and in birds that had never seen any human heads. In a two-alternative forced-choice procedure the pigeons were trained to discriminate between pictures of either handless or headless humans and nonhumans. On test, the birds had to choose (i) between body parts they had already seen in training and the parts that had been missing, (ii) between previously seen parts and arbitrary skin patches, and (iii) between previously missing parts and skin patches. Only the pigeons that lacked experience with real heads and were trained with pictures of headless humans failed to show a significant preference for pictures of missing parts (i.e., heads) over arbitrary skin patches. This demonstrates the importance of individual experience with the real 3D-referents of pictures for classification of the latter and is thereby evidence of representational insight.
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Notes
Of course, it would have been desirable to also raise pigeons without experience with “real” human hands. However, this was not done for practical reasons, as rendering the hands unrecognizable would have required a clumsy type of disguise which would have made cleaning, controlling of the nests, removal of broken eggs etc., almost impossible.
Graded judgements can nevertheless be made in 2AFC by calculating the proportion of trials in which a particular stimulus type is chosen in preference to another one. If a subject has a general and systematic preference for one type, it will choose it in a high proportion of trials, however small this bias may be in absolute terms.
Correction trials were excluded from analysis.
It may also be worth considering whether the differences between the Restricted and the Unrestricted pigeons regarding their age and/or their experimental histories may have influenced the results. However, the absence of any general differences in test performance between Restricted and Unrestricted birds argues against either of them playing a prominent role.
In addition, the small ns, which were 4 (Group Unrestricted No Heads) and 5 (Group Restricted No Heads), made it very difficult to achieve significance.
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Acknowledgments
The research was supported by the Austrian Science Foundation through Grant V3-B03 to Ulrike Aust and Grant P19574-B03 to Ludwig Huber. Thanks are due to Michael Steurer for developing all necessary computer software and for servicing the technical equipment, and to Johanna Kramer and Katharina Kramer for their assistance in the pigeon laboratory. Finally, we wish to thank Anna Wilkinson and Michael Steurer for valuable comments and discussion.
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Aust, U., Huber, L. Representational insight in pigeons: comparing subjects with and without real-life experience. Anim Cogn 13, 207–218 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-009-0258-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-009-0258-4