Animal Cognition: Concept Formation - Lecture Notes - Prof. Martin, Slides of Psychology

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Animal Cognition

Lecture 8 : Concept Formation

Questions?

Are animals capable of ‘abstract thinking’ in a

human-like sense?

Difficult to rule out that what appears to be

conceptual thinking cannot be explained by low-level

cues

Concept Formation/Category Learning

• Discrimination between classes of stimuli (cars vs planes)
• Generalization within classes of stimuli (boeing vs airbus)

• S+ any slide with a tree
• S- any slide with no tree
• Train on 40 S+, 40S-
• Test with novel slides
• Birds perform better than chance on novel slides i.e. they transfer
• What is going on? Discrimination - Typical experiment

Number of Responses Number of Sessions

Discrimination

• Between classes of stimuli (behaving differently in different situations) - Tree vs. goldfish - Tree vs. humans - Tree vs. water
  • Trees vs. non-trees But what’s a tree?

Pigeons' discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso Claude Monet Pablo Picasso right-left inversion Upside-down (Watanabe et al., 1995) right-left inversion Upside-down

Impressionist vs Cubist Édouard Manet Georges Braque

• Category discrimination (or classification) = different behavior toward things in different categories. This describes what pigeons are doing.
• Concept = cognitive structure that may underlie category discrimination.
• Have the birds learned a concept?

Theories of basic level concept formation -- how do they do it?: (i) Exemplar theory : is a proposal concerning the way humans categorize objects and ideas in psychology. It argues that individuals make category judgments by comparing new stimuli with instances already stored in memory. The instance stored in memory is the “ exemplar ”. (ii) Prototype theory : Abstract a prototype that corresponds to the central tendency of training exemplars. Classify novel exemplars on basis of similarity to prototype. Robin Penguins Features of a bird?

Exemplar theory: Animals are storing information about training exemplars — which is why they will be more accurate with them than with novel test stimuli. This implies their performance can be explained by exemplar theory However, it is reported that humans show the prototype effect (e.g., Homa et al., 1981) -- they categorize the prototype more accurately than the training stimuli, even if it has never been seen before This is more consistent with prototype theory ... and doesn’t seem to fit exemplar theory Theories of basic level concept formation -- how do they do it?:

So do animals store exemplars and humans a prototype? Are humans and animals forming basic-level concepts in different ways? Theories of basic level concept formation -- how do they do it?: