PERCEPTUAL BASES OF VISUAL CONCEPTS

描述(申请人摘要)：区别对待的能力 作为共同类别的成员的不同外部刺激是定义 概念化的属性。先前的研究表明，动物作为 由于人类和鸽子的多样性，可以对逼真的视觉刺激进行分类 分为自然和人工两个类别。当前的竞争对手 延续应用的目的是看人的知觉过程是否 人类和鸽子的概念化是相似的。鸽子将会是 接受过辨别线条画的操作条件处理程序培训 以及自然和人工刺激的计算机渲染。鸽子们会 然后用特别修改的刺激物进行测试：(1)去除某些 训练刺激的部分，(2)重新排列其组成部分，(3) 深度旋转图像。这些测试刺激产生高度特异性 对人类的影响，这鼓励了这样一种观点，即人类物体识别是 由指定非意外(即， 视点不变)零件的表示以及零件之间的关系 这些部件--通过组件进行识别。如果人和鸽子类似 处理视觉刺激，然后计划的一系列 用鸽子做的实验应该与用人做的实验相似。经验主义 趋同将证明自然界的节约，也证明了 概念化的语言。经验上的分歧意味着 不同的神经生物学或语言机制调节视觉概念 在人和鸽子身上。无论是哪种情况，这项研究项目的结果 应该能很好地阐明该物种的普遍性 概念化，并可能产生重要的线索，如何认知和 计算机科学家可能会更成功地设计智能系统， 能够进行视觉模式识别。这一结果还可能促进 性别歧视和泛化过程的行为分析 学习障碍或语言缺陷的人类。

DESCRIPTION (Applicant's abstract): 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 competitive continuation application 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 and computer renderings of natural and artificial stimuli. The pigeons will then be tested with specially modified stimuli that: (1) remove certain portions of the training stimuli, (2) rearrange its component parts, (3) rotate the image in depth. These test stimuli produce highly specific effects in humans, which encourage the view that human object recognition is mediated by a structural description specifying a non-accidental (i.e., viewpoint-invariant) representation of the parts and the relations among those parts--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 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 that are 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.