Journal article
Pigeon category learning: Revisiting the Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961) tasks
Journal of experimental psychology. Animal learning and cognition, Vol.45(2), pp.174-184
04/2019
DOI: 10.1037/xan0000198
PMCID: PMC6730555
PMID: 30869935
Abstract
In a seminal study, Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961; henceforth SHJ) assessed potential mechanisms involved in categorization learning. To do so, they sequentially trained human participants with 6 different visual categorization tasks that varied in structural complexity. Humans' exceptionally strong performance on 1 of these tasks (Type 2, organized around exclusive-or relations) could not be solely explained by structural complexity, and has since been considered the hallmark of rule-use in these tasks. In the present project, we concurrently trained pigeons on all 6 SHJ tasks. Our results revealed that the structural complexity of the tasks was highly correlated with group-level performance. Nevertheless, we observed notable individual differences in performance. Two extensions of a prominent categorization model, ALCOVE (Kruschke, 1992), suggested that disparities in the discriminability of the dimensions used to construct the experimental stimuli could account for these differences. Overall, our pigeons' generally weak performance on the Type 2 task provides no evidence of rule-use on the SHJ tasks. Pigeons thus join monkeys in the contingent of species that solve these categorization tasks solely on the basis of the physical properties of the training stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Pigeon category learning: Revisiting the Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961) tasks
- Creators
- Victor M Navarro - Department of Psychological and Brain SciencesRidhi Jani - Department of Psychological and Brain SciencesEdward A Wasserman - Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Journal of experimental psychology. Animal learning and cognition, Vol.45(2), pp.174-184
- Publisher
- United States
- DOI
- 10.1037/xan0000198
- PMID
- 30869935
- PMCID
- PMC6730555
- ISSN
- 2329-8456
- eISSN
- 2329-8464
- Grant note
- National Institutes of Health; Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development P01 HD080679 / NICHD NIH HHS
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 04/2019
- Academic Unit
- Psychological and Brain Sciences; Iowa Neuroscience Institute
- Record Identifier
- 9984070621702771
Metrics
14 Record Views