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Good art Children's art that a pigeon judged to be "good"
Animal Cognition

Consider how mystifying a walk through an art museum can be. Although dramatic changes in style are simple for anyone to spot, imagine asking someone, on their very first visit: “which of these paintings are the best and which are the worst?” Yet a connoisseur, after learning to identify the finer points of various styles, would have no trouble picking out his or her favorite pieces.

A much easier task would be to identify good children’s artwork. Still, consider what a challenging task even this is for the brain -- taking in a complex field of colors and shapes, making some sense of it, and deciding “good” or “not.”

It’s an impressive task, but even a bird can do it. A recent experiment by Shigeru Watanabe showed that the utterly un-artistic pigeon could be taught to identify “good” and “bad” children’s artwork. How was the pigeon able to perform this feat and why should we care that it did?

Step back for a moment and look around your environment. Perhaps you’re sitting at a desk, by a table, or near a window. Outside, you might see trees, grass, other people, birds, and flowers. Despite the fact that you’re probably receiving only a small amount of visual information about many of these stimuli, it seems to be an effortless and unthinking process to classify these objects into their respective categories. Categorizing these patterns of visual stimulation allows you to make sense of an often complex and chaotic world.

It might very well be the case that much of our substantial neural machinery is built to address this complex problem of object recognition; nevertheless, identifying so many different kinds of objects must surely be a difficult computational task. After all, we rarely see the same version of any of these objects again. Still, the task may be simplified by constraints on the appearance of these objects. Most birds have beaks and wings; most trees have tall brown trunks and green leafy branches; etc. As well, the trees, flowers, and grass will stay relatively still, whereas the birds and people will move in ways that are true to their biological nature.

Remarkably, when pigeons are suitably trained, they too can learn a variety of visual categories. We train the animals to report these visual categories by placing them into an operant conditioning chamber (or Skinner box), a common psychological testing apparatus. There, the pigeons are shown photographs on a computer monitor and they receive grain when they correctly respond in a kind of computer game which requires that they peck one key when they are shown a picture of a cat, a second when they are shown a picture of a human, a third when they are shown a picture of a car, and a fourth when they are shown a picture of a flower. After training, the pigeons can also generalize these categorization responses to new photographs that they have never before seen, thereby revealing that they have extracted information about the characteristic features in each of the categories that they have been taught.

Understanding how animals categorize and process these visual stimuli has important implications for our view of both animals and people. These kinds of discriminations attest to the ability of animals to learn both categories and concepts, once thought to be uniquely human abilities. From other research in this field of comparative cognition, we now know that animals such as pigeons and monkeys respond to not only different perceptual categories of objects, like trees or cats, but also to relational concepts, such as sameness and differentness. Comparing the strategies that animals and people use to solve these complex tasks can reveal similarities, or disparities, in how we learn about the world and adapt to new problems, despite (or because of) what may be large neuroanatomical differences.