Mechanisms of Avian Object Perception and Recognition

这项研究的目的是了解动物，特别是鸟类，是如何感知和学习世界的。特别是，首席研究员正在调查鸟类如何感知物体，以及所涉及的认知和大脑机制是否与人类和其他动物相同或不同。鸽子是这种比较认知研究的理想选择，因为它们已经进化出了小而强大的中枢神经系统，能够进行特殊的视觉感知和复杂的辨别学习。这项研究的目标是推进三个相关的调查线，看看鸽子如何检测和识别物体的边缘，检测和识别物体移动或旋转时的变化，以及如何将复杂的物体分解成更小的部分以进行识别。这些被视觉科学家普遍认为是理解视觉感知机制的基本问题。视觉感知仍然是最难解决的生物学难题之一。例如，我们仍然无法制造出一个视觉导向的机器人，它可以像山雀一样在视觉上嘈杂的森林冠层中移动。在像鸟类这样的小型视觉复杂动物身上研究这些感知机制，是解决这些问题的关键一步。这项研究将立即影响我们对包括人类在内的复杂动物感知世界的视觉、神经和心理机制的理解。这种类型的比较研究也是许多科学家在实验室和野外环境中通过调查各种动物物种之间行为相似性和差异性的分布，来了解认知和行为的进化和机制及其在自然世界中的功能的更大科学事业的一部分。除了对动物行为理论具有重要的科学意义外，拟议的研究对人类健康、福利和教育具有更广泛的影响和应用。这项研究是了解大脑如何产生和控制行为的总体努力的一部分。对小型生物系统如何工作的机制的理解可能会导致类似的实际工程？智能？用于各种目的的系统（例如，用于盲人的紧凑型视觉假肢，用于搜索和救援的自主机器人，高效的信息传输算法）。与研究有关的活动将用于教育和培训研究生、本科生、中学和小学教育的学生。还将开展利用互联网的外展项目。

The goal of this research is to understand how animals, and more specifically birds, perceive and learn about the world. In particular, the Principal Investigator is investigating how birds perceive objects and whether the cognitive and brain mechanisms involved are the same as or different from those of humans and other animals. Pigeons are ideal for such comparative cognitive studies because they have evolved small, powerful, central nervous systems capable of exceptional visual perception and complex discrimination learning. The objectives of the research are to advance three related lines of investigations looking at how pigeons detect and recognize the edges of objects, detect and recognize changes in an object when it moves or rotates, and how complex objects are broken by into smaller parts for the purposes of recognition. These are universally agreed on by vision scientists to be fundamental issues in understanding the mechanisms of visual perception. Visual perception continues to be one the most demanding and difficult biological riddles to solve. For example, it is still beyond our capacities to build a visually-directed robot that can match a chickadee''s ability to move through a visually noisy forest canopy. Examining these perceptual mechanisms in small visually sophisticated animals, like birds, is a key step towards solving such questions. This research will immediately impact our understanding of the visual, neural, psychological mechanisms by which complex animals, including humans, perceive the world. 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. Beyond its scientific importance to theories of animal behavior, the proposed research has broader impacts and applications to human health, welfare, and education. 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 may lead 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). Activities related to the research will be used to educate and train students at the graduate, undergraduate, secondary and primary levels of education. Outreach programs using the internet will also be pursued.