Mechanisms of Avian Same-Different Concept Learning

这项研究的最终目标是了解像鸟类这样的小型复杂系统如何学习世界是如何运作的（即物体和事件之间的关系），并利用这些知识灵活地应对新情况。当前研究的具体目标是研究鸽子如何学习对各种类型的视觉刺激及其排列之间相同和不同关系的一般和特殊性质作出反应。识别差异和相似性是最古老和最基本的心理辨别之一，对我们理解感知、概念行为、智力相关行为以及语言对它们的一般调解具有重要意义。鸽子是这种比较认知研究的理想选择，因为它们进化出了小而强大的中枢神经系统，具有非凡的视觉感知和复杂的辨别学习能力。这项研究将立即影响我们对包括人类在内的复杂动物学习使用概念的心理机制的理解。这项研究是理解大脑如何产生规则支配行为的总体努力的一部分，其长期结果将对教育系统产生影响。此外，了解小型生物系统如何工作的机制可能是用于各种目的的类似“智能”系统的实际工程的关键（例如，用于盲人的紧凑型视觉假体，用于搜索和救援的自主机器人，有效的信息传输算法）。这项比较研究也是许多科学家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的更大科学事业的一部分。

The ultimate goal of this research is to understand how small complex systems, like birds, learn about how the world operates (i.e., relations between objects and events) and use this knowledge to flexibly respond to new situations. The specific objective of the current research is to examine how pigeons learn to respond to the general and specific properties of same and different relations between various types of visual stimuli and their arrangement. Recognizing difference and similarity is among the oldest and most fundamental of psychological discriminations, with important implications for our understanding of perception, conceptual behavior, intelligence-related behaviors, and their general mediation by language. 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 capacities. This research will immediately impact our understanding of the psychological mechanisms by which complex animals, including humans, learn to use concepts. This research is part of the general effort to understand how the brain generates rule-governed behavior, the long-term outcome of which will have implications for educational system. In addition, understanding 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 comparative research is also part of a larger scientific enterprise by many scientists to understand the evolution and mechanisms of cognition and behavior by investigating the distribution of behavioral similarities and differences among a wide variety of animal species.