The role of stimulus quality

The present project is aimed at extending our knowledge on picture-object recognition in animals by investigating the role of stimulus quality for establishing picture-object correspondence in pigeons. Pictures are always abstractions of the objects they portray. They misrepresent or even lack, a number of aspects that support the recognition of real things and are reduced along various physical dimensions. This has to do with the inevitable two-dimensionality of pictures as well as with technical shortcomings. Moreover, picture technology is adjusted to the human visual system and ignores the fact that the visual functions of species may differ as a consequence of their phylogenetic histories. The present project will investigate various aspects of stimulus quality for their relevance to picture-object recognition in pigeons, such as familiarity with the respective object class, abstractiveness/ naturalness of stimuli, motion, (absence of) the third dimension, size, color, spatial frequency, and viewing angle. Apart from conventional methods of stimulus presentation (i. e., real objects and photographs), some of the suggested tests will use, for the first time, holographic stimuli as a means for investigating animal cognition abilities. Employing holography in an experiment on picture processing in a nonhuman species is an innovative step that may stimulate and inspire future research in the entire field of animal visual cognition. Actually, such methodology may be of interest to a wide range of studies on animal perception and visual categorization and applicable in experiments with a variety of different species. Project Website: http://www.oeaw.ac.at/byzanz/mary.htm

The present project is aimed at extending our knowledge on picture-object recognition in animals by investigating the role of stimulus quality for establishing picture-object correspondence in pigeons. Pictures are always abstractions of the objects they portray. They misrepresent or even lack, a number of aspects that support the recognition of real things and are reduced along various physical dimensions. This has to do with the inevitable two-dimensionality of pictures as well as with technical shortcomings. Moreover, picture technology is adjusted to the human visual system and ignores the fact that the visual functions of species may differ as a consequence of their phylogenetic histories. The present project will investigate various aspects of stimulus quality for their relevance to picture-object recognition in pigeons, such as familiarity with the respective object class, abstractiveness/ naturalness of stimuli, motion, (absence of) the third dimension, size, color, spatial frequency, and viewing angle. Apart from conventional methods of stimulus presentation (i. e., real objects and photographs), some of the suggested tests will use, for the first time, holographic stimuli as a means for investigating animal cognition abilities. Employing holography in an experiment on picture processing in a nonhuman species is an innovative step that may stimulate and inspire future research in the entire field of animal visual cognition. Actually, such methodology may be of interest to a wide range of studies on animal perception and visual categorization and applicable in experiments with a variety of different species.