Marcia Spetch: An Avian Perspective on Vision and Action: From Scene Analysis to Place
Pigeons, like humans, depend upon efficient perceptual and behavioural
mechanisms in order to solve critical and recurrent problems in their daily
lives. The research I will present investigates several basic processes
underlying pigeons' ability to solve one such problem, namely "Where's my
dinner?" Remembering and finding a goal may require the solution of
numerous subproblems, including scene and object recognition, selection of
spatial cues, encoding of metric information and spatial relationships,
determination of heading, and navigation to the goal. Pigeons' use of
spatial information is surprisingly general across tasks that vary
dramatically in scale of space, nature of visual information, and type of
response. Comparative studies suggest interesting similarities and
differences between how pigeons and other species solve object recognition
and place finding tasks.