A Modified Feature Theory as an Account of Pigeon Visual Categorization
Ludwig Huber, Ulrike Aust · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2009
Categorization is one of the most enduring subjects in cognitive science. Focusing on the function of categorization as the propensity of an organism to respond differentially to a class of stimuli, animal discrimination-learning paradigms have been used to illuminate how people might learn and represent new concepts. As claimed by feature theory, categorization may be based on the abstraction of “common features” (that is, a necessary set of defining features that characterize members of the same category). This chapter proposes a modified version of feature theory as an account of visual categorization in pigeons, focusing mainly on “natural” categories such as people. It discusses the characteristics of the modified feature theory in more detail and supports its main assumptions by reporting evidence from experiments on pigeons. The available evidence suggests that stimulus perception, feature selection, and processing mode strongly depend on the specifics of a particular task; different types of features may even coexist in a pigeon's internal representation of a category.