Abstract
J. Cerella Pattern Recognit. 12 (1980) 1 and more
recently S. Watanabe Behav. Proc. 53 (2001) 3
demonstrated that pigeons showed no decrement in
recognizing cartoons that were spatially scrambled,
indicating that pigeons’ discriminative responding is
controlled by local features alone. In contrast
Kirkpatrick-Steger et al. J. Exp. Psychol. Anim.
Behav. Proc. 24 (1998) 34 used line drawings as
stimuli and demonstrated the importance of spatial
organization for picture recognition by pigeons,
confirming related findings reported in their previous
studies. The present study revisited the recognition of
cartoons by pigeons. In Experiment 1, pigeons were
trained to discriminate cartoon people on a variety of
background scenes. Subsequent tests revealed that
discriminative performances with both familiar and
novel instances decreased as the objects and
object-like parts were progressively fragmented,
indicating that search for the targeted cartoon people
in the stimulus array might have enhanced the pigeons
to attend to global aspects of cartoon people.
Experiment 2 used line drawings of cartoon faces as
stimuli and examined effects of scrambling and deletion
of components. A set of components (eyes and eyebrows)
exerted strong control over behavior and scrambling
only moderately suppressed responding. The results
suggest that pigeons use both global and local aspects,
with different mixtures of these types of information
depending on the particular perceptual context.
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