Perceptual bases of visual concepts

描述（由申请人提供）：区别对待不同的外部刺激作为一个共同类的可替代成员的能力是概念化的定义属性。先前的研究表明，像人类和鸽子这样不同的动物可以将逼真的视觉刺激分为自然和人工类别。本竞争延续应用程序的目的是看看是否概念化的感知过程是类似的人类和鸽子。将增加新的关键人员，他们具有视觉特征识别和基于对象的注意力方面的专业知识，可以帮助推进项目的目标。 将使用操作性条件反射程序对猪进行训练，以区分自然和人工刺激的线条画和计算机渲染。然后，鸽子将被测试与特别修改的刺激：（1）删除某些部分的训练刺激，（2）重新排列其组成部分，（3）旋转图像的深度。这些测试刺激在人类中产生高度特异性的效果，这鼓励了这样的观点，即人类对象识别是由指定非偶然的（即，视点不变）的表示以及这些部件之间的关系--通过部件的识别。 如果人和鸽子处理视觉刺激的方式相似，那么计划中的一系列鸽子实验的结果应该与人的结果相似。经验上的趋同将证明自然的节约和用于概念化的语言的多余。经验分歧意味着不同的神经生物学或语言机制介导的人和鸽子的视觉概念。无论是哪种情况，这个研究项目的结果都应该对概念化的物种普遍性有相当大的启发，并可能为认知科学家和计算机科学家如何更成功地设计能够进行视觉模式识别的智能系统提供重要线索。这些结果也可以促进对学习障碍或语言缺陷的人的歧视和泛化过程的行为分析。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The ability to treat discriminatively different external stimuli as substitutable members of a common class is the defining property 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. New key personnel will be added with expertise in visual feature identification and object-based attention who can help advance the objectives of the project. 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, and (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.