Mechanisms of Avian Perception, Categorization, and Memory

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Non-Technical Summary The goal of this research is to understand how small complex systems learn about the world, in particular how they perceive objects and the relations between these objects and events and how they use this knowledge to flexibly respond to new situations. The specific objectives of the current research are to advance three complementary lines of inquiry examining in detail the behavioral mechanisms of same/different concept learning, stimulus memory, and motion-based object perception in pigeons. These are important issues because recognizing difference and similarity is among the oldest and most fundamental of psychological discriminations, with important implications for understanding of perception, conceptual behavior, intelligence-related behaviors, and their mediation by language. Understanding the processes underlying the large visual memory capacity of these animals will also advance our knowledge of how brains are capable of encoding large amounts of information and how and why they fail as a function of aging and disease. Finally, understanding the mechanisms underlying visual perception ranks among the most demanding and difficult of biological issues. Examining how these mechanisms operate in a visually sophisticated animal system is a key step towards solving such questions. Pigeons are ideal for such comparative cognitive studies because they evolved small, powerful, central nervous systems capable of exceptional visual perception and complex discrimination learning. This research will immediately impact our understanding of the psychological mechanisms by which complex animals, including humans, use the combination of specific memories and concepts to guide behavior. This research is part of the general effort to understand how the brain generates and controls behavior. An understanding of the mechanisms of how small biological systems work could be key to the practical engineering of similar "smart" systems for a variety of purposes (e.g., compact visual prostheses for the blind, autonomous robots for search and rescue, efficient information transmission algorithms). This type of comparative research is also part of a larger scientific enterprise by many scientists to understand the evolution and mechanisms of cognition and behavior and their functions in the natural world by investigating the distribution of behavioral similarities and differences among a wide variety of animal species in both laboratory and field settings.