PERCEPTUAL BASES OF VISUAL CONCEPTS

有区别地对待不同的外部刺激的能力， 共同类的成员是概念化的定义属性。 先前的研究表明，像人类和鸽子这样的动物 可以将逼真的视觉刺激分为自然的和人工的 类别本提案旨在观察感知是否 人类和鸽子的概念化过程是相似的。 猪将接受操作性调节程序培训， 区分自然和人工刺激的线条画。他们将 然后用特别修改的刺激进行测试：（a）删除某些 部分训练刺激，（B）重新排列其组成部分，或 (c)旋转图像的深度。这些测试刺激产生高度选择性的 对人类的影响，这鼓励了我们将其归类为 通过一个零碎的，知觉的过程-识别对象， 件.如果人和鸽子处理视觉刺激的方式相似， 计划中的一系列鸽子实验的结果应该 与之前的人相比。经验趋同将 证明了自然的经济和语言的多余， 概念化经验分歧意味着， 神经生物学或语言学机制介导人的视觉概念 还有鸽子无论哪种情况，该研究项目的结果都应 揭示了概念化的物种普遍性， 可以为认知科学家和计算机科学家 可能会更成功地设计出智能系统， 模式识别结果还可以促进行为 分析学习中的辨别和概括过程- 残疾人或语言缺陷的人。

The ability to treat discriminatively different external stimuli as members of a common class is the defining attribute of conceptualization. Prior work has shown that animals as diverse as human beings and pigeons can classify lifelike visual stimuli into natural and artificial categories. The present proposal aims to see whether the perceptual processes of conceptualization are similar in humans and pigeons. Pigeons will be trained with operant conditioning procedures to discriminate line drawings of natural and artificial stimuli. They will then be tested with specially-modified stimuli that: (a) delete certain portions of the training stimulus, (b) rearrange its component parts, or (c) rotate the image in depth. These test stimuli produce highly selective effects in humans, which have encouraged the view that we categorize objects by means of a piecemeal,perceptual process--recognition by components. If people and pigeons similarly process visual stimuli, then the results of the planned series of experiments with pigeons should parallel those obtained earlier with people. Empirical convergence would attest to the economy of nature and to the superfluity of language for conceptualization. Empirical divergence would imply that different neurobiological or linguistic mechanisms mediate visual concepts in people and pigeons. In either case, the results of this research project should shed considerable light on the species generality of conceptualization and could yield important clues for how cognitive and computer scientists might more successfully design intelligent systems capable of visual pattern recognition. The results could also promote the behavioral analysis of discrimination and generalization processes in learning- disabled or language-deficient humans.