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Effects of stimulus duration and choice delay on visual categorization in pigeons
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Effects of stimulus duration and choice delay on visual categorization in pigeons

Olga F Lazareva and Edward A Wasserman
Learning and motivation, Vol.40(2), pp.132-146
2009
DOI: 10.1016/j.lmot.2008.10.003
PMCID: PMC2699671
PMID: 20161256
url
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/2699671View
Open Access

Abstract

We [Lazareva, O. F., Freiburger, K. L., & Wasserman, E. A. (2004). Pigeons concurrently categorize photographs at both basic and superordinate levels.\nPsychonomic Bulletin and Review,\n11, 1111–1117] previously trained four pigeons to classify color photographs into their basic-level categories (cars, chairs, flowers, or people) or into their superordinate-level categories (natural or artificial). Here, we found that brief stimulus durations had the most detrimental effect on the basic-level discrimination of natural stimuli by the same pigeons. Increasing the delay between stimulus presentation and choice responding had greater detrimental effect on the basic-level discrimination than the superordinate-level discrimination. These results suggest that basic-level discriminations required longer stimulus durations and were more subject to forgetting than were superordinate-level discriminations. Additionally, categorization of natural stimuli required longer stimulus durations than categorization of artificial stimuli, but only at the basic level. Together, these findings suggest that basic-level categorization may not always be superior to superordinate-level categorization and provide additional evidence of a dissociation between natural and artificial stimuli in pigeons’ categorization.
 Forgetting Stimulus similarity Superordinate-level categorization Visual categorization Basic-level categorization Pigeons

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