Abstract
The cognitive and neural mechanisms for recognizing and categorizing behavior are not well understood in non-human animals. In the current experiments, pigeons and humans learned to categorize two non-repeating, complex human behaviors (“martial arts” vs. “Indian dance”). Using multiple video exemplars of a digital human model, pigeons discriminated these behaviors in a go/no-go task and humans in a choice task. Experiment 1 found that pigeons already experienced with discriminating the locomotive actions of digital animals acquired the discrimination more rapidly when action information was available than when only pose information was available. Experiments 2 and 3 found this same dynamic superiority effect with naïve pigeons and human participants. Both species used the same combination of immediately available static pose information and more slowly perceived dynamic action cues to discriminate the behavioral categories. Theories based on generalized visual mechanisms, as opposed to embodied, species-specific action networks, offer a parsimonious account of how these different animals recognize behavior across and within species.
Highlights
Interpreting and categorizing the behavior of others is an essential social skill for humans
An analogous analysis of the dynamic presentations revealed no significant differences related to training group, but it did confirm the expected main effect of block, F(4,92) = 32.4, p,.001, g2p = .59. These results indicate that the Mixed-Training group learned to accurately respond to static presentations sooner and better than their Static-Only counterparts, but the mixture of the two presentation conditions during training did not impact the learning of the dynamic condition
Regardless of the original training, dynamic trials were responded to slower than static trials which suggests that additional time was needed or taken to process, perceive, and incorporate motion cues during dynamic trials. Both the pigeons and the humans learned to discriminate videos depicting categories of complex behaviors based on the nonrepetitive, articulated motions of a digital human actor
Summary
Interpreting and categorizing the behavior of others is an essential social skill for humans. One theory has pivoted around the notion that humans have an action observation network which is critically tied to the embodied simulation of the bodily movements of others and is key to understanding conspecific actions and intentions (e.g., [4]). Some suggest that this system uses evolved, species-specific motor-based knowledge to recognize actions by internally simulating or emulating observed actions [7,9]. The ‘‘mirror system’’ is a result of within-lifetime learning, not an evolutionary visuo-motor linkage necessary for action understanding [13]
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