EFFECTS OF SPATIAL REARRANGEMENT OF OBJECT COMPONENTS ON PICTURE-RECOGNITION IN PIGEONS

Five pigeons were first trained to discriminate among line drawings of four objects: a watering can, an iron, a desk lamp, and a sailboat Th e birds were then tested with eight versions of each object, in which the object's components were vertically and horizontally rearranged. T he pigeons displayed different degrees of generalization decrement to the different scrambled versions of the objects. Two analyses helped t o clarify the nature of the varied accuracy scores. First, cluster ana lyses disclosed subsets of components that were related to test perfor mance. Second, although the clusters varied somewhat across birds for a given object, there was reliable concordance among the subjects in t heir rankings of the individual scramblings, suggesting that the pigeo ns may have attended to common aspects of the drawings.