Abstract
Monkeys and pigeons were trained to discriminate between normally oriented full frontal pictures of humans and upside-down reversals of the same pictures as stimuli. Monkeys displayed a high level of transfer to the new pictures of full frontal and rear views of humans and silhouettes, but failed to transfer to the close-up and far human faces. Pigeons showed poorer transfer to the silhouettes and higher transfer to the far human faces than did monkeys. Further transfer tests were performed with non-human pictures, including monkeys, birds, mammals, and man-made objects. Pigeons failed to transfer to the non-human pictures. This indicates that the pigeons had learned to classify the pictures based on some concrete features specific to the humans and that the transfer to the new versions of human pictures could be explained by simple stimulus generalization based on perceptual similarity. Two out of four monkeys did transfer fairly well to the non-human pictures, except for the man-made objects. High levels of transfer to the non-human natural pictures suggested that the monkeys classified the pictures on the basis of the orientation of objects represented by the pictorial displays.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Butler, R. A. &J. H. Woolpy, 1963. Visual attention in the rhesus monkey.J. Comp. Physiol. Psychol., 56: 324–328.
Cerella, J., 1979. Visual classes and natural categories in the pigeon.J. Exp. Psychol.: Human Percept. Perform., 5: 68–77.
D'Amato, M. R. &P. V. Sant, 1988. The person concept in monkeys (Cebus apella).J. Exp. Psychol.: Anim. Behav. Processes, 14: 43–55.
Herrnstein, R. J., 1979. Acquisition, generalization, and discrimination reversal of a natural concept.J. Exp. Psychol.: Anim. Behav. Processes, 5: 116–129.
———— &P. A. de Villiers, 1980. Fish as a natural category for people and pigeons. In:The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Vol. 14,G. H. Bower (ed.), Academic Press, New York, pp. 59–95.
———— &D. H. Loveland, 1964. Complex visual concept in the pigeon.Science, 146: 549–551.
————, &C. Cable, 1976. Natural concepts in pigeons.J. Exp. Psychol.: Anim. Behav. Processes, 2: 285–302.
Jitsumori, M., A. A. Wright, &R. G. Cook, 1988. Long-term proactive interference and novelty enhancement effects in monkey list memory.J. Exp. Psychol.: Anim. Behav. Processes, 14: 146–154.
Poole, J. &D. G. Lander, 1971. The pigeon's concept of pigeon.Psychon. Sci., 25: 157–158.
Redican, W. K., M. H. Kellicutt, &G. Mitchell, 1971. Preferences for facial expression in juvenile rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta).Develop. Psychol., 5: 539.
Ringo, J. R. &R. W. Doty, 1985. A macaque remembers pictures briefly viewed six months earlier.Behav. Brain Res., 18: 289–294.
Roberts, W. A. &D. S. Mazmanian, 1988. Concept learning at different levels of abstraction by pigeons, monkeys, and people.J. Exp. Psychol.: Anim. Behav. Processes, 14: 247–260.
Sackett, G. P., 1965. Response of rhesus monkeys to social stimulation presented by means of colored slides.Percept. Mot. Skills, 20: 1027–1028.
Sands, S. F., C. E. Lincoln, &A. A. Wright, 1982. Pictorial similarity judgments and the organization of visual memory in the rhesus monkey.J. Exp. Psychol.: General, 3: 369–389.
Schrier, A. M., R. Angarella, &M. L. Povar, 1984. Studies of concept formation by stumptailed monkeys: Concepts of humans, monkeys, and letterA. J. Exp. Psychol.: Anim. Behav. Processes, 10: 564–584.
———— &P. M. Brady, 1987. Categorization of natural stimuli by monkeys (Macaca mulatta): Effects of stimulus set size and modification of exemplars.J. Exp. Psychol.: Anim. Behav. Processes, 13: 136–143.
Siegel, R. K. &W. K. Honig, 1970. Pigeon concept formation: Successive and simultaneous acquisition.J. Exp. Anal. Behav., 13: 385–390.
Swartz, K. B., 1983. Species discrimination in infant pigtail macaques with pictorial stimuli.Develop. Psychol., 16: 219–231.
Vaughan, W., Jr. &S. L. Greene, 1984. Pigeon visual memory capacity.J. Exp. Psychol.: Anim. Behav. Processes, 10: 256–271.
Wasserman, E. A., R. E. Kiedinger, &R. S. Bhatt, 1988. Conceptual behavior in pigeons: Categories, subcategories, and pseudocategories.J. Exp. Psychol.: Anim. Behav. Processes, 14: 235–246.
Yoshikubo, S., 1985. Species discrimination and concept formation by rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta).Primates, 26: 285–299.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
A preliminary report was presented by the first author (M. J.) at the 13th Congress of the International Primatological Society, Nagoya, Japan, 1990. The present research was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research, the Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture, No. 02301017 (principal researcher:Tadasu Oyama, Nihon University) to M. J. The monkey experiments were conducted at the Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, and the pigeon experiments at the Department of Psychology, Chiba University.
About this article
Cite this article
Jitsumori, M., Matsuzawa, T. Picture perception in monkeys and pigeons: Transfer of rightside-up versus upside-down discrimination of photographic objects across conceptual categories. Primates 32, 473–482 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02381938
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02381938