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.
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12 Comments
Add CommentOh for crying out loud. Some bird trainer teaches a bird to recognize patterns appearing in a picture.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCongrats to the bird trainer for being clever in training the bird to appear in a carnival side show right next to the horse that can do math by stomping its hoof.
obviously, you are jealous of the pigeon
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll the pigeon "knows" when it sees it is the minimum state of information needed to see before it recognizes its living counterpart. It doesn't know doodly about Picasso, although the Pollock fractyl representations might cause it some alarm.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI personally feel that the pigeons were able to identify good artwork because a witch cast a spell on the pigeons.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSure, plausible, but who conditioned the witch?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo royniles, you're selling us art teachers short. I've taught art to 12 to 14 year olds for eighteen years. I do not indoctrinate the students in what art appeals to me or not. I don't grade based on whether I think its pretty or not. I give the students a task to master and I facilitate their path. If the child has tried their best to reach mastery, they get a good grade. Its all about the experiencing, organizing, and problem solving.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPieces in museums are about the viewer seeing the world through someone else's eyes. They're about seeing the evolution of human thought. And they're about the variety of ways of people can communicate ideas.
I thought we were talking about what pigeons know when they see it? Of course children have an innate appreciation for the abstract that pigeons have yet to demonstrate. (I'm assuming, perhaps prematurely, that you don't teach pigeons along with those children.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe point in my view is not to make pigeons into art critics but rather, using a well-tested experimental model, to test or develop their skills in categorization, an important issue in comparative cognition. In humans, for instance, it develops around 18 months. In the art example described, the category is a complex but rather vague one: the qualities in the pictures that a group of people agrees on liking. I wouldnt call the pictures necessarily good or bad, only conforming to an agreed taste; but it does show that the bird subjects have cognitive ability in classifying that is a step more sophisticated than identifying a picture in category cat. That is, it tests sameness or similarity opposed to difference with a broader constellation of characteristics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn my experience, it took the initiativeyes, Ill stand behind that wordof a turtle captive in a household for eight years demonstrating her understanding of categories to wake me to new possibilities of we might learn about that understudied taxon. Her demonstration took me by surprise and redirected my whole career path into animal behavior. What was interesting, too, was that hatchling turtles were also able to make the same kinds of discriminations. In the wild, turtles have no parental care; they must be on their own and discriminating edible classes within the first week, when the nutritive egg sac is completely absorbed.
Lately Ive been thinking that the most surprising thing about that epiphany with the older turtle was not that she understood categories of objectswouldnt that be adaptive for any wild animal, needing, for instance, to discriminate foods or predators?but that she figured out how to communicate it to a human.
Rosemary D. Lombard, Chelonian Connection, Hillsboro, Oregon
Book-in-Progress: Diodes Experiment: A Box Turtle Investigates the Human World
I usually wouldn't respond just to rip other people's comments, but some of the above are so ridiculously off-base and indicative of misunderstanding of the article at hand I just had to. I can understand that the authors or said comments may have been making humorous points or using a little satire (which I can appreciate), but I'm not sure most people would get this (or that I do, for that matter).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis study says nothing about what is "truly" good art, and what isn't. All it says is that whatever qualities cause people to see art as "good/bad" can be learned and identified by a pigeon. It's really pretty mind blowing. I think part of the reason for this is because the concept of good vs. bad art is so illusive and seemingly intangible and even undefinable. Something so close to what makes us human, what makes us special, what we hold closest to our hearts.
I can't understand how the first responder could think this study merely amounts to a hoaxy carnival side-show (like the famous horse-mathematician mentioned). Did you even read the article? If you're were making a point through humor I doubt its clear enough for most people to appreciate, and instead could even lead people to dismiss this kinda of research out-of-hand.
And to the art teacher, I totally respect your comment and attitude, so please don't take the above as directed at you. I would disagree with you though about what 'you' do in teaching art class. Even helping students to make MORE CREATIVE art is a way of categorizing "good/bad" art just like in the study. Although I guess it is true you have several different motivating forces going on here. If they were making art for your own personal enjoyment and consumption, or to sell to others, then you couldn't be blamed for attempting to influence their artistic expression to be more in line with more popular aesthetic preferences. However I doubt this is the case. : ) A different cause for the art (which I think your comments show you are MUCH more in line with) could be bringing joy and learning and catharsis into the children's lives. Almost using it like therapy. In this way, I'd agree with you that you don't have to make any judgments about the quality of the art according to anyone but the child artist him/herself. But I think there's at least one more factor at play here: you want to prepare the kids for future art classes, and if they have the potential to one-day be serious and successful (professional maybe) artist, then you're going to want to, at the very lease, inform them of the public's preferences for certain qualities in artistic expression. So even if you don't think about it explicitly, I have to believe part of you is working in this fashion, in order to help the kids mature as artists. Just the idea of such a thing as an "art teacher" for kids is a wonderful thing. I think we need WAY more chances and encouragement for personal/artistic expression in school and everyday life. I hope you see this response because I'd much like to hear your reaction to my response.
Peace.
My guess is that the human figured out how turtles communicate to cooperative entities. The empathy function is not restricted to within-species channels.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisO Lord, I'm Amazed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs it that pigeons are like humans That much?
Yet you have not defined what exactly is good, I here feel that your standards are correct.
The further truth is that pigeons are rather more careless of humans than other bird families, as anyone can see by just walking by some.
I there an <a href="http://www.1oregonartist.com">oregon book</a> that contains pictures of all of these places? Where would I find one in utah? Is it better to find a local publisher to buy it from or send out for it?
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