| Abstract: | Two experiments investigated texture discrimination in pigeons. In a simultaneous conditional-discrimination procedure, pigeons were reinforced for pecking at a small target region of identically colored form elements embedded in a larger region of distractor elements. These regions differed in either color or shape or differed redundantly in both dimensions. Pigeons readily acquired these discriminations and showed substantial positive discrimination transfer to new displays composed from novel recombinations of training colors and shapes, novel colors and shapes, and novel spatial organizations. The global organization of these displays appeared to be chief property mediating performance. This suggests that pigeons have mechanisms for perceptually grouping regions of similar colors and shapes, and these mechanisms may be similar to the preattentive visual mechanisms proposed for human texture segregation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
