Natural Concept Discrimination at Varying Levels of Abstraction in Two Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

AbstractPigeons were trained on four different visual discrimination tasks: (1) concept of natural stimuli (food vs. non-food object discrimination); (2) arbitrary classification of natural stimuli (pseudoconcept); (3) concept of artificial stimuli (triangles generated by computer graphics); and (4) discrimination of one pair of artificial stimuli. Then, lesions of the ectostriatum were carried out. The ectostriatal lesions impaired the arbitrary classification of natural stimuli and the concept of artificial pattern but did not impair the natural concept or the simple discrimination of fixed two stimuli. Lesions in the neostriatum did not cause deficits in any discrimination task. The birds had to learn individual stimuli for the arbitrary classification of stimuli and the stimulus generalization test after the artificial pattern concept discrimination indicated that the pigeons formed a concept more complicated than “triangle” in human language. These results suggest that the ectostriatum plays a role in task discrimination that requires much visual processing to classify stimuli.

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Natural Concept Discrimination in an American Black Bear (Ursus americanus)

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e603962013-047 ◽

2009 ◽

Author(s):

Jennifer Vonk ◽

Stephanie E. Jett

Keyword(s):

Ursus Americanus ◽

Black Bear ◽

American Black Bear ◽

Natural Concept ◽

American Black ◽

Concept Discrimination

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Scale-free architectures support representational diversity

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x19002966 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 43 ◽

Author(s):

Chris Fields ◽

James F. Glazebrook

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Architecture ◽

Levels Of Abstraction ◽

Scale Free ◽

Abstract Representations ◽

Computational Architecture ◽

Architectural Models ◽

Cognition Scale

Abstract Gilead et al. propose an ontology of abstract representations based on folk-psychological conceptions of cognitive architecture. There is, however, no evidence that the experience of cognition reveals the architecture of cognition. Scale-free architectural models propose that cognition has the same computational architecture from sub-cellular to whole-organism scales. This scale-free architecture supports representations with diverse functions and levels of abstraction.

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