Aspects of human working memory capacities, for example, appear to be both domain-general ( Chiappe and MacDonald, 2005, Janata et al., 2002, Kirkham et al., 2002) and shared with a broad range of animal species ( Chiappe and MacDonald, 2005, Kawai and Matsuzawa, 2001, Murphy et al., 2008). Some cognitive resources required to process structure are shared across domains (e.g., music and language) and possibly with other animal species. Such structure-based learning is an important part of humans’ everyday sensory experience, regardless of whether these learning processes are statistical or explicitly rule-based ( Peña, Bonatti, Nespor, & Mehler, 2002). Whether natural or man-made, complex visual, auditory or tactile inputs are usually categorized by humans using relations established between their constituent components ( Conway & Christiansen, 2005). Appreciating the overall symmetry of a building or painting, delighting in themes and variations in music, or parsing a sentence in our native language are all examples of tasks that require sophisticated structural processing. Humans are strongly inclined to discover and process structure in sensory stimuli ( Gombrich, 1984). Processing of sensory regularities by humans and other animals These findings, and our general approach, have implications for the design of future pattern learning experiments, and the interpretation of comparative cognition research more generally.ġ.1.
Our results show that similar behavioral outcomes can be achieved using dramatically different strategies and highlight the dangers of combining multiple individuals in a group analysis.
Although performance was above chance and quite high for kea, no individual of either species provided clear evidence of learning exactly the rule used to generate the training stimuli. Individual pigeons, in contrast, adopted an idiosyncratic mix of strategies that included local transition probabilities and global string similarity. Kea adopted effective heuristic strategies, based on matching learned bigrams to stimulus edges. Birds’ choices also exhibited consistent species-level differences. Individual birds showed considerable differences in the number, type and heterogeneity of heuristic strategies adopted. We developed a model selection paradigm, based on regular expressions, that allowed us to reconstruct the specific decision strategies and cognitive heuristics adopted by a given individual in our task. Patterns were composed of several abstract elements and had varying degrees of structural complexity. We trained and tested two bird species, pigeons ( Columba livia) and kea ( Nestor notabilis, a parrot species), on visual patterns using touch-screen technology. Past research has focused either on one species’ ability to process pattern classes or different species’ performance in recognizing the same pattern, with little attention to individual and species-specific heuristics and decision strategies. Comparative pattern learning experiments investigate how different species find regularities in sensory input, providing insights into cognitive processing in humans and other animals.
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