PERCEPTUAL BASES OF VISUAL CONCEPTS

描述（申请人摘要）：区别对待的能力 不同的外部刺激作为一个共同的类的成员是定义 概念化的属性。 先前的研究表明， 像人类和鸽子一样， 分为自然和人工两类。 目前的竞争力 继续应用的目的是看看是否知觉过程的 概念化在人类和鸽子中是相似的。 小猪会 接受过操作性条件反射程序的培训，以区分线条图 以及自然和人工刺激的计算机渲染。 鸽子会 然后用特别修改的刺激进行测试：（1）去除某些 部分训练刺激，（2）重新安排其组成部分，（3） 旋转图像的深度。 这些测试刺激产生高度特异性的 影响人类，这鼓励了这样一种观点，即人类物体识别是 通过指定非偶然的结构描述（即， 视点不变）表示的部分和之间的关系 这些部分--通过组件识别。 如果人和鸽子 处理视觉刺激，然后计划的一系列结果 用鸽子做的实验应该和用人做的实验一样。 实证 收敛将证明自然的经济和过剩的 概念化的语言。 经验分歧意味着， 不同的神经生物学或语言学机制调节视觉概念 在人和鸽子身上 不管是哪种情况，这个研究项目的结果 应该对物种的普遍性有相当大的启示， 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， 有视觉模式识别能力。 研究结果还可以促进 对认知过程中的辨别和概括过程的行为分析 有学习障碍或语言缺陷的人。

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.