Mechanisms of Avian Object Perception and Recognition

这项研究的目标是了解动物，更具体地说，鸟类是如何感知和了解世界的。特别是，首席调查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与人类和其他动物的认知机制和大脑机制是否相同或不同。鸽子是这种比较认知研究的理想对象，因为它们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研究方向，着眼于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，以及复杂物体如何被分割成更小的部分以进行识别。这些都被视觉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的生物学谜题之一。例如，建造一种视觉定向机器人，可以与山雀S在视觉嘈杂的森林树冠上移动的能力相媲美，这仍然超出了我们的能力。在鸟类等视觉复杂的小型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进行的一项更大的科学事业的一部分，目的是通过调查实验室和野外环境中各种动物物种的行为相似和差异的分布，了解认知和行为的进化和机制及其在自然界中的功能。除了对动物行为理论的科学重要性之外，这项拟议的研究还对人类健康、福利和教育产生了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、智能的、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、中学和小学的学生。还将继续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.