Mechanisms of Avian Visual Perception, Cognition, and Action

描述（申请人提供）：视觉是现代认知科学中一个经久不衰的难题，阐明视觉客体感知的机制是一个特殊的挑战。在到达视网膜的反射光中，没有任何东西包含关于视野中物体的位置、形状、大小或数量的直接信息。了解大脑如何处理视觉刺激以获得这些信息将是视觉科学的一大进步。因为鸟类是活跃和移动的，鸟类视觉系统必须解决同样的问题，这些问题推动了人类和机器视觉研究的理论进步。在如此小的非哺乳动物系统中研究这些问题，大大促进了统一的一般视觉理论的发展。利用我们发达的基于辨别学习的心理物理技术，我们建议通过研究椋鸟和鸽子在受控分析环境下如何处理视觉刺激来评估这个问题。这将是

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Vision is one of the enduring puzzles of modern cognitive science and elucidating the mechanisms of visual object perception presents a particular challenge. Nothing in the reflected light that arrives at the retina contains direct information about the location, shape, size, or number of objects in view. Understanding how the brain processes visual stimuli to derive this information would be a major advance in visual science. Because birds are active and mobile, avian visual systems must resolve the same problems that have driven theoretical advances in human and machine vision research. Examining these issues in such small, non-mammalian systems adds substantially to the development of a unified general theory of vision. Using our well-developed psychophysical techniques based on discrimination learning, we propose to evaluate this problem by examining in how starlings and pigeons process visual stimuli in controlled analytical contexts. This will be the first parallel comparison of visual processing in two avian species. The overall objective of this application is to investigate and compare how these species solve central problems of visual cognition and object perception as related to the processing of illumination and shading, edge processing and figural grouping, and the recognition and classification of behavior and action. Our specific aims include: 1) equating our procedures for the comparative examination of visual processing in these species; 2) examining the processing of surface shading and its contributions to object and depth perception; 3) examining edge and figural grouping processes in shape perception; and 4) examining the mechanisms of visually-mediated action and movement recognition. The current project is a part of our long-term objective to understand the proximate psychological, computational and neural mechanisms by which different pattern recognition systems perceive, recognize, categorize, integrate, understand, and respond to complex visual information. The unique combination of visual power, small size, and different neural organization exemplified by birds offers a special scientific opportunity for better understanding this extremely important sensory modality and how it functions and is implemented across different classes of animals. This comparison will address whether there are only a few biologically plausible mechanisms for rapid visual processing of objects or whether there are multiple routes to functional vision in highly mobile organisms. Because there is strong evolutionary pressure for highly efficient and rapid computation of visual information placed on the small, highly visual brain of birds, our results will contribute directly to the pracical development of treatments, corrective solutions or prostheses for humans with a variety of visual disorders and to the design of visual sensors for self-guided bio-mimetic robotic devices. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Visual perception is critical to virtually every aspect of human behavior. Using new modifications to a behavioral approach that has consistently yielded important information about vision and its mechanisms, the primary goal of our proposed research is the comparative analysis of visual perception of objects and movement in two bird species. We expect that our results will constitute a significant advance in our understanding of visual object perception and contribute to treatments or corrective solutions for humans suffering from a wide variety of visual disorders or deficits.