Object discrimination by pigeons: effects of object color and shape

Can nonhuman animals attend to visual stimuli as whole, coherent objects? We investigated this question by adapting for use with pigeons a task in which human participants must report whether two visual attributes belong to the same object (one-object trial) or to different objects (two-object trial). We trained pigeons to discriminate a pair of differently colored shapes that had two targets either on a single object or on two different objects. Each target equally often appeared on the one-object and two-object stimuli; therefore, a specific target location could not serve as a discriminative cue. The pigeons learned to report whether the two target dots were located on a single object or on two different objects; follow-up tests demonstrated that this ability was not entirely based on memorization of the dot patterns and locations. Additional tests disclosed predominate stimulus control by the color, but not by the shape of the two objects. These findings suggest that human psychophysical methods are readily applicable to the study of object discrimination by nonhuman animals.