NDLI: Representational insight in pigeons: comparing subjects with and without real-life experience

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Aust, Ulrike Huber, Ludwig
Copyright Year	2009
Abstract	Understanding the relation between objects and their pictures at a level beyond mere feature discrimination is by no means a trivial cognitive ability, and support of this is still weak in nonhuman species. Here, we report evidence of representational insight in pigeons. Responding to pictures of human body parts was compared in birds that had extensive pre-experience with live humans and in birds that had never seen any human heads. In a two-alternative forced-choice procedure the pigeons were trained to discriminate between pictures of either handless or headless humans and nonhumans. On test, the birds had to choose (i) between body parts they had already seen in training and the parts that had been missing, (ii) between previously seen parts and arbitrary skin patches, and (iii) between previously missing parts and skin patches. Only the pigeons that lacked experience with real heads and were trained with pictures of headless humans failed to show a significant preference for pictures of missing parts (i.e., heads) over arbitrary skin patches. This demonstrates the importance of individual experience with the real 3D-referents of pictures for classification of the latter and is thereby evidence of representational insight.
Starting Page	207
Ending Page	218
Page Count	12
File Format	PDF
ISSN	14359448
Journal	Animal Cognition
Volume Number	13
Issue Number	2
e-ISSN	14359456
Language	English
Publisher	Springer-Verlag
Publisher Date	2009-07-11
Publisher Place	Berlin, Heidelberg
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Subject Keyword	Picture–object recognition Representational insight Visual experience Pigeons Zoology Behavioural Sciences Human Physiology Evolutionary Biology
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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