Comparative Vision and Attention

许多研究人员研究非人类动物如何看待世界。然而，到目前为止，由于动物学习和反应能力的限制，只有某些类型的实验是可能的。在美国国家科学基金会的资助下，哈佛大学和布兰代斯大学的中山博士和佩珀伯格博士将通过用英语询问鸟类来解决有关灰鹦鹉视觉处理的问题，就像人们询问人类受试者一样。 灰鹦鹉模仿人类语言的能力是使它们成为受欢迎的宠物的一个特点。 佩珀堡的灰鹦鹉亚历克斯（现已去世）能够对简单的视错觉做出口头反应（例如，穆勒-莱尔错觉，其中两条线在人类看来长度不同，但实际上没有;亚历克斯和人类一样回应。中山博士和佩珀伯格博士将训练两只鸟，格里芬和亚瑟，学会用英语语音标记各种颜色和形状。 目前的项目将研究鹦鹉是否能像人一样（a）完成一个部分覆盖的物体的形状（例如，（B）“看到”实际上并不真实的物体，比如一个三角形“出现”在以三角形方式排列的三个类似吃豆人的部分圆圈之间，这一过程被正式称为“虚幻轮廓”或“Kanizsa图”。例如，人们可能认为鹦鹉能够推断出一个无法完全观察到的捕食者的存在，但没有人能够直接问任何非人类的问题。 未来的研究将涉及更复杂的任务，旨在研究鸟类如何注意到他们的视觉环境中的物体。这项研究的长期目标是确定这些任务是否揭示了鸟类和人类之间感知处理的差异。训练鹦鹉的成功将使Nakayama和Pepperberg博士最终能够检查广泛的视觉任务，以确定哪些感知能力在鸟类和人类中具有相同的潜在机制，哪些没有。这两个大脑大小非常不同的物种之间的相似性将使我们能够理解感知的哪些组成部分可以用较小规模的神经结构来实现。差异将表明哪些组件确实需要更大的大脑尺寸和/或复杂性。这些数据将指导未来与其他物种的比较，并为人类大脑的结构和功能提供见解，并可能为人工视觉处理器的设计提供有用的见解。

Many researchers study how nonhuman animals see the world. To date, however, only certain types of experiments have been possible, given the limitations of animal learning and response capabilities. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Drs. Nakayama and Pepperberg at Harvard and Brandeis Universities will address questions about visual processing in Grey parrots, by querying the birds in English, much as one queries human subjects. Grey parrots' ability to mimic human speech is one characteristic that has made them popular as pets. Pepperberg's Grey parrot Alex (now deceased) was able to verbally respond to simple optical illusions (e.g., the Müller-Lyer illusion, in which two lines appear to humans to vary in length but in reality do not; Alex responded as do humans). Drs. Nakayama and Pepperberg will train two birds, Griffin and Arthur, to learn to label various colors and shapes using the sounds of English speech. The current project will then examine whether parrots, like people, can (a) complete the shape of a partially covered object (e.g., recognize a figure as a square, and not as a five-cornered object, even though one of its corners is covered by a circle), a process formally known as "amodal completion" and (b) "see" objects that aren't actually real, like a triangle that "appears" between three pac-man-like partial circles that are arranged in a triangular manner, something formally known as an "illusory contour" or "Kanizsa figure". One might expect a parrot to be able, for example, to infer the presence of a predator that isn't fully observable, but no one has been able to ask any nonhuman such questions directly. Future research will involve more complex tasks designed to study how birds pay attention to objects in their visual environment.The underlying long-term goal of this research is to determine whether the tasks reveal differences in perceptual processing between birds and humans. Success in training the parrots will enable Drs. Nakayama and Pepperberg eventually to examine a broad range of visual tasks to determine which perceptual abilities share the same underlying mechanisms in birds and humans and which do not. Similarities between these two species with very different brain sizes will allow us to understand which components of perception can be implemented with smaller scale neural architecture. Differences will indicate the components that do require greater brain size and/or complexity. The data will guide future comparisons with other species and provide insights into the structure and function of the human brain and may provide useful insights for the design of artificial visual processors.