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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 6, 2025

A Method for Investigating Change Blindness in Pigeons Columba Livia

A Method for Investigating Change Blindness in Pigeons Columba Livia

Published on: September 7, 2018

Dynamically occluded action recognition by pigeons.

Suzanne L Gray¹, Muhammad A J Qadri², Robert G Cook³

¹Department of Psychology, Tufts University, 490 Boston Ave, Medford, MA, 02155, USA. Suzanne.Gray@tufts.edu.

Attention, Perception & Psychophysics

|March 15, 2023

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Pigeons can recognize animal behaviors like running and walking, even when the animal is partially hidden. This ability to perceive motion from fragmented views is similar to human perception.

Keywords:

Action recognition Dynamic occlusion Pigeon

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Area of Science:

Animal behavior
Cognitive ethology
Visual perception

Background:

Organism behavior identification is crucial for survival.
Dynamic occlusion and fragmentation pose challenges to recognizing behaviors.
Human ability to recognize fragmented actions is well-established, but animal capabilities are less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate pigeons' ability to discriminate between running and walking actions of digital animal models under dynamic occlusion.
To determine if pigeons can process fragmented motion information to identify behaviors.

Main Methods:

Six pigeons were trained using a go/no-go procedure with digital animal models.
Models transited behind multiple occluders in a semi-realistic scene, presenting fragmented views.
Discrimination transfer was tested with novel models, directions, rates, perspectives, and occluders.

Main Results:

All pigeons successfully learned to discriminate between running and walking actions despite dynamic occlusion.
The learned discrimination transferred to novel conditions, including unfamiliar models and visual perspectives.
Pigeons relied on motion features, particularly articulated motion, for behavior discrimination.

Conclusions:

Pigeons, like humans, can discriminate actions from fragmented visual information.
This demonstrates a sophisticated ability in pigeons to process spatio-temporally occluded motion.
The findings highlight the importance of motion cues in animal behavior recognition.