Chapter 29 - Perceptual and Abstract Category Learning in Pigeons

Abstract

Whether nonhuman animals—even those phylogenetically distant from humans, such as pigeons—can learn categories and to what extent the involved learning mechanisms are perceptually or conceptually based have been extensively researched over the past few decades. In this chapter, we will discuss similarity-based or perceptual category learning, which involves sorting stimuli into classes that share physical properties. We will also discuss nonsimilarity-based relational category learning, which requires the organism to recognize and respond to an abstract property of multiple stimuli: namely, the relationship among objects (e.g., same/different, less than/greater than, above/below, etc.). We will show that pigeons are able to form both perceptual and abstract categories with considerable proficiency, and in much the same way as do humans and nonhuman primates. Still, we remain some distance from fully understanding the behavioral and neural mechanisms of categorization.