PERCEPTUAL BASES OF VISUAL CONCEPTS

描述：(改编自申请者摘要)治疗能力 区别不同的外部刺激作为共同类别的成员是 概念化的定义属性。先前的研究表明， 像人类和鸽子一样的各种动物都可以将逼真的视觉归类 刺激分为自然刺激和人工刺激。目前的建议旨在 以确定概念化的知觉过程是否 与人类和鸽子相似。鸽子将接受操纵者的训练 区分自然线条和线条的条件化程序 人工刺激。然后，他们将接受特别改装的测试 删除训练刺激的某些部分的刺激，即 重新排列其组成部分，或在平面或中旋转图像 深度。这些测试刺激在人类身上产生高度选择性的效应， 这鼓励了这样一种观点，即我们通过一种 零碎的感知过程--按组件进行识别。如果人们和 鸽子同样处理视觉刺激，然后对结果进行计划 在鸽子身上进行的一系列实验应该与早先获得的实验结果相同 和人们在一起。经验上的趋同肯定会证明 自然和多余的语言进行概念化。经验主义 分歧意味着不同的神经生物学或语言 机制在人和鸽子身上调节视觉概念。

DESCRIPTION: (Adapted from 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 proposal aims to determine 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 delete certain portions of the training stimulus, that rearrange its component parts, or that rotate the image in the plane or 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 surely 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.