Pigeons acquire multiple categories in parallel via associative learning: a parallel to human word learning?

ABSTRACT: Might there be parallels between category learning in animals and word learning in children? To examine this possibility, we devised a new associative learning technique for teaching pigeons to sort 128 photographs of objects into 16 human language categories. We found that pigeons learned all 16 categories in parallel, they perceived the perceptual coherence of the different object categories, and they generalized their categorization behavior to novel photographs from the training categories. More detailed analyses of the factors that predict trial-by-trial learning implicated a number of factors that may shape learning. First, we found considerable trial-by-trial dependency of pigeons' categorization responses, consistent with several recent studies that invoke this dependency to claim

SUBMITTER: Wasserman EA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4621274 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature