Abstract
Keller
and Schoenfeld (1950) proposed a unique behavioral perspective on
conceptualization. They suggested that concepts refer solely to an
organism’s behavior and to the conditions under which it occurs; as
such, conceptual behavior need be neither verbal nor uniquely human. Herrnstein and Loveland (1964)
advanced that behavioral perspective by deploying an elegant training
procedure to teach visual concepts to pigeons. Keller and Schoenfeld’s
perspective and Herrnstein and Loveland’s methodology have inspired my
own research into conceptualization by pigeons. Using a system of
arbitrary visual tokens, my colleagues and I have built ever-expanding
nonverbal “vocabularies” in pigeons through a variety of different
concept learning tasks. Pigeons have reliably categorized as many as
2000 individual photographs from as many as 16 different human object
categories, even without the benefit of seeing an item twice. Our formal
model of conceptualization effectively embraces 25 years of empirical
evidence as well as generates novel predictions for both pigeon and
human conceptual behavior. Comparative study should continue to
elucidate the commonalities and disparities between human and nonhuman
conceptual behavior; it should also explicate the relationship between
associative learning, object recognition, conceptualization, and
language.
Keywords
- Conceptual behavior;
- Discrimination;
- Generalization;
- Vision;
- Pigeon
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
