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Effects of Varying Stimulus Size on Object Recognition in Pigeons
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Effects of Varying Stimulus Size on Object Recognition in Pigeons

Jessie J Peissig, Kimberly Kirkpatrick, Michael E Young, Edward A Wasserman and Irving Biederman
Journal of experimental psychology. Animal behavior processes, Vol.32(4), pp.419-430
10/2006
DOI: 10.1037/0097-7403.32.4.419
PMID: 17044744

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Abstract

The authors investigated the pigeon's ability to generalize object discrimination performance to smaller and larger versions of trained objects. In Experiment 1, they taught pigeons with line drawings of multipart objects and later tested the birds with both larger and smaller drawings. The pigeons exhibited significant generalization to new sizes, although they did show systematic performance decrements as the new size deviated from the original. In Experiment 2, the authors tested both linear and exponential size changes of computer-rendered basic shapes to determine which size transformation produced equivalent performance for size increases and decreases. Performance was more consistent with logarithmic than with linear scaling of size. This finding was supported in Experiment 3. Overall, the experiments suggest that the pigeon encodes size as a feature of objects and that the representation of size is most likely logarithmic.
Vision object recognition pigeon (Columba livia) learning size invariance

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