Perceptual bases of visual concepts

描述(由申请人提供)：将不同的外部刺激视为共同类别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，像人类和鸽子这样种类繁多的动物可以将逼真的视觉刺激分为自然和人工两类。目前的竞争性延续应用旨在观察概念化的知觉过程在人类和鸽子中是否相似。将增加在视觉特征识别和基于对象的注意方面具有专门知识的新的关键人员，他们可以帮助推进项目的目标。鸽子将接受操作条件反射程序的训练，以区分自然和人工刺激的线条绘制和计算机渲染。然后，鸽子将被用特别修改的刺激进行测试：(1)删除训练刺激的某些部分，(2)重新排列其组成部分，(3)深度旋转图像。这些测试刺激在人类中产生高度特异性的影响，这鼓励了这样一种观点，即人类对象识别是由指定部件的非偶然(即，视点不变)表示以及这些部件之间的关系的结构描述所中介的--部件识别。如果人和鸽子处理视觉刺激的过程类似，那么计划在鸽子身上进行的一系列实验的结果应该与人相似。经验上的趋同将证明自然界的经济性和概念化语言的多馀。经验上的分歧将意味着不同的神经生物学或语言机制在人和鸽子的视觉概念中起中介作用。无论如何，这一研究项目的结果应该会对概念化的物种共性有相当大的帮助，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。这一结果还可以促进对学习障碍或语言缺陷的人的歧视和概括过程的行为分析。

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.