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Acquisition of the same/different concept in animals






 

It is an advanced intellectual feat for non human animals to detect the sameness or difference of a collection of stimuli and to make distinctively different responses to the relation “the same” and “difference. An even more advanced feat would be for animals to match the relation between relations, in other words, to exhibit the essence of analogical reasoning

(Delius, 1994; Premack, 1983). According to the experimental protocol of same/different discrimination, the subject has to respond “same” when two or more stimuli are identical and “different” if one or more of the stimuli are different from others. This is the basic element of many cognitive tasks. After learning the same/difference discrimination, the degree to which this behaviour transfers to novel situations having same and different relations is taken as evidence of concept formation (same/different, or a S/D concept). Using the same/different choice task, it has been found that pigeons, parrots, rhesus monkeys, baboons, and chimpanzees are capable of learning and applying the S/D concept across a wide variety of simultaneously presented visual elements. An advanced variant of the same/different choice task is Multidimensional Scaling (MDS). As many other techniques which are applied to studying animal intelligence, MDS has its origins in psychometrics (Richardson, 1938; Torgerson, 1952). Animals from widely different species appeared to acquire the same-different concept comparing complex stimuli of multiple components.

For example, Cook et al. (2003) tested pigeons using go/no go discrimination, in which alternating sequences of either same (AAAA… or BBBB…) or different (ABAB… or BABA) photographic stimuli were presented within a trial. At any one time only a single item was visible, thereby eliminating any perceptual features related to element simultaneity as a basis for learning or transfer. Pigeons were first shaped to peck at a white warning signal. Once consistent responding was established, sequences of stimuli were introduced. Each of these trials started with a single peck to the warning signal, followed by either identical or different stimuli for 20 s. The stimuli tested during discrimination training consisted of combination of two elements – a small object figure centrally located on a naturalistic background. In one test the figure elements consisted of pictures of six common objects (soccer ball, bell, key, cup, teddy bear, and phone). The background elements consisted of pictures of six landscapes. In other tests number of figure elements was increased up to several tens and the stimuli varied in size. Separate tests were performed with video stimuli. Each test involved the successive presentation of different events. Basing on many series of alterations and variants of combinations of stimuli, these experiments provide evidence that pigeons can differentiate same and different sequences based on the alteration of only two picture stimuli. Birds can discriminate change in colour, grey-scale, and video stimuli, although stimuli with smaller differences proved difficult for the pigeons to learn. The discrimination was maintained when tested with large numbers (55 figures) of randomly combined photographic stimuli of two different sizes.

In other series of experiments concerning pigeon’s acquisition of “sameness” based on multidimensional scaling (Wasserman et al., 1995; Young and Wasserman, 1997), subjects were first taught to peck one button when they viewed an array of computer icons that comprised 16 copies of the same icon and to peck a second button when they viewed an array that comprised 16 different icons (a same-different discrimination task). The pigeons were later tested with new same and new different displays that were created from a second set of 16 computer icons that had never before been shown during discrimination training. Accuracy to the training stimuli averaged from 83% to 93%, and accuracy to the testing stimuli averaged from 71% to 79%; in each case, choice accuracy reliably exceeded the chance score of 50%. Such robust discrimination learning and stimulus generalisation attest to the pigeon's acquisition of an abstract same-different concept. Baboons were similarly trained and tested with the same visual stimuli. Accuracy to the training stimuli averaged 91% correct, and accuracy to the testing stimuli averaged 81% (Wasserman et al., 2000).

A proper assessment of MDS requires not only that subjects conceive that different objects have common class attributes but also that the subjects can discriminate among individual members within a category. For example, if pigeons get food in the presence of one random set of photos and do not get food in the presence of another set of photos, the birds may respond equally to all the “food” items and withhold response to all the “no-food” items. This presumably does not mean that pigeons find the photos within each group perceptually similar to each other, and dissimilar to those in the other group (Blough, 2002). So the domain of multidimensional scaling in animal mentality is closely related to categorisation.






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