PERCEPTUAL BASES OF VISUAL CONCEPTS

描述：（改编自申请人的摘要） 区别不同的外部刺激作为一个共同的类的成员， 概念化的定义属性。 先前的工作表明， 像人类和鸽子这样种类繁多的动物可以将逼真的视觉 刺激分为自然和人工类别。 本提案旨在 以确定概念化的知觉过程是否 在人类和鸽子中也是如此。 猪将接受操作训练 条件程序，以区别自然和 人工刺激 然后他们将用经过特殊改造的 删除训练刺激的某些部分的刺激，即 重新排列其组成部分，或在平面内旋转图像， 深入 这些测试刺激在人类中产生高度选择性的效果， 这鼓励了这样一种观点，即我们通过一种 零碎的知觉过程--通过成分的识别。 如果人们和 鸽子同样处理视觉刺激，然后计划的结果 用鸽子做的一系列实验应该与以前的实验相类似 与人 经验上的趋同肯定会证明 自然和多余的语言概念化。 实证 分歧意味着不同的神经生物学或语言学 机制介导人和鸽子的视觉概念。

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.