Perceptual bases of visual concepts

描述（由申请人提供）：将区别对待的不同外部刺激作为一个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，像人类和鸽子这样多种多样的动物可以将逼真的视觉刺激分为自然和人工两类。本研究的目的是观察人类和鸽子概念化的知觉过程是否相似。新的关键人员将增加，他们具有视觉特征识别和基于对象的关注方面的专业知识，可以帮助推进项目的目标。鸽子将接受操作性条件反射程序的训练，以区分自然和人工刺激的线条图和计算机渲染图。然后，鸽子将接受特殊修改的刺激测试：(1)去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效果，这鼓励了这样一种观点，即人类物体识别是由一种结构描述介导的，该描述指定了部分的非偶然（即，视点不变）表示以及这些部分之间的关系——通过组件识别。如果人和鸽子处理视觉刺激的过程相似，那么计划中的一系列鸽子实验的结果应该与人类实验的结果相似。经验的收敛将证明自然的经济性和概念化语言的多余性。经验差异意味着不同的神经生物学或语言机制介导了人和鸽子的视觉概念。无论哪种情况，这个研究项目的结果都应该对概念化的物种普遍性提供相当大的启示，并可能为认知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。研究结果也有助于对学习障碍或语言缺陷人群的辨别和泛化过程进行行为分析。

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.