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What is the context of this research?

When we open our eyes, we see a world full of objects. But our retinas receive only messy blobs of colors and patterns. How do we construct an orderly world from such chaos? The visual system of humans and other primates binds separate visual features together to create coherent objects. What about birds who fly without colliding with objects? To answer this question, we will let pigeons play a video game on a touchscreen computer in order to test whether bird brains handle object perception the same way that the human brain does. If so, then the fundamental process of object perception evolved at least 275 million years ago when mammals and birds share the last common ancestor.

What is the significance of this project?

The bird brain has a very different organization than the brains of humans and other mammals. Birds don't have a visual cortex, for example. Also, the brain of a pigeon is the size of your thumb! So how can birds, like pigeons, see objects the way that we do? Knowing how birds see the world can tell us a lot about what is unique about human vision, and what we share with other species. We can also use our knowledge of how small bird brains efficiently create visual objects out of messy input to find new and powerful ways to build artificial visual systems for small mobile devices, such as drones and robots.

What are the goals of the project?

The study of visual object perception in humans uses computer-based visual tasks. We will adapt this task for pigeons. We will reward pigeons with food for playing a "video game", that is, pecking at four visual objects presented sequentially on a touchscreen. Objects will be presented in orderly or random sequences.

Objects will be created with unique combinations of visual features of place, color, and shape. After the pigeons learn to peck at these objects for food, we will occasionally present objects in novel sequences.

Like humans, pigeons should be slower to respond to objects presented out of sequence only when the object's color-shape-place feature information is changed. Response times should NOT be slower for an object shown out of sequence if feature information is preserved.