Studies on Concept Formation

Psych 1090

Lecture 2

The definition of concept, like that of cognition

is rather flexible and involves many different types of behavior

So we are going to examine concept formation from the simplest to the most complex cases

And do it for a small (for the moment) variety of species

Concept formation, of at least some sort, is a very basic phenomenon

Whether consciously or unconsciously, and organism must distinguish, e.g.,
predator from prey/ friend-foe

food from not-food

possible mates from non-mates

And, in any case, creatures must organize the big, confusing world into some form of workable hierarchy so that attention can be paid, shifted, directed, etc. appropriately for survival

One big issue, that we mentioned last time,

is whether animals, lacking language, can form concepts and, I said that they canbut now Ill give some real data

We can split concept formation into three major categories. object recognition
what is or is not a key or a pencil

relational/abstract
bigger/smaller; same/different

equivalence/transitive inference
A>B, B>C, C>D, D>EB?D

Well hold off on concepts like same/different and transitive inference for now Theres enough just on other areas of concept formation for todays lecture

But even the simplest level, object recognition isnt really so simple.
Think about the prototypical bird:

beak, feathers, wings, flight

But what about

Some of these creatures have some bird-like characteristics and are clearly not birds;

Others lack some of these birdlike characteristics and clearly are birds

And, of course, what might be one important category to a

bird

Might be two to a human:

For a bird, the snakes are functionally equivalent in that both are predators; But for humans one is dangerous and one is not

And although humans can, for example, detect many variations in neighboring white-crowned sparrow dialects, To a bird in a given dialect, all the others are lumped into the foreign category,

And in different areas, different parts of the songs (e.g., trills versus introductory notes) may be critical for recognition

So, one can train an animal like a pigeon to, for example, categorize all trees
by pecking to picture of a few trees and not to a picture of a bird But pigeons were less easily trained to form the category car Something unnatural for it

And pigeons completely failed when asked to categorize

one particular oak leaf from among a number of oak leaves

A discrimination not at all important to a pigeon

More recently, a number of researchers (e.g., Cerella, Watanabe, etc.) showed that pigeons emphasize local cues
So they had considerable trouble distinguishing some, but not others of the following.

Pigeons couldnt distinguish intact versus distorted cubes

TTTTTT T T T T

T T T T TTTTTTT T T T T

Pigeons could find the T in either picture, but not the H (Anim. Cogn. 2002)

And if given a regular triangle as the positively rewarded choice, and then shown

Pigeons chose the trapezoid rather than the occluded item

Suggesting that they chose on the basis of just the line figure

More recently, Watanabes group showed that pigeons cant really discriminate scrambled from unscrambled cartoon figure heads At least until they got really scrambled

1x1

3x3

6x6

12x12

Could discriminate scrambled from unscrambled pictures of pigeon heads

And Wassermans group argued that scrambling a line figure makes the task more difficult for the pigeon

But pigeons seem to have a hierarchy of attention So they may first look for curves versus straight edges

And then look for specific types of angles

And other studies suggest that motion is a critical factor

Some researchers nevertheless argue that pigeons can be trained to do any kind of discrimination,
and that may be correct But the point is that some discriminations are more ethologically relevant and thus are trained more easily

Other more subtle issues come up as well. If you use video for birds, you have to use LCD projectors
Because their flicker-fusion rates differ from those of humans, CRT screens are difficult to view

And what is true for a pigeon may not be true for another type of bird
Parrots go anorexic in an operant paradigm and stop responding And some hummingbirds, who are win/shift foragers, have real trouble w/ a win/stay operant paradigm

Theres the issue, too, of neighbor/stranger discrimination in song sparrows And how at first some data showed it existed and other data didnt. But the real issue was knowing the exact territorial boundary

And, of course, most studies on categorization are done with animals that categorize the world visually,
much like humans But pigeons and people would fail if the criteria were scents. or subtle auditory cues

And studies of polymorphous stimuli-where a combination of attributes must be present for an item to be judged as correct Suggest that in pigeons the additive features should be ecologically related for success

Remember our prototypic birdif we assume wings AND beaks,

But if we assume wings AND flight,

So, how do we go about dealing with such issues?

Lets look at the study on monkeys and humans, Dpy et al. on the conjoined search

Training was on marked items

[yellow vs. blue was color discrimination, not a bar]

The idea was to determine which 2 of 3 qualities, color/shape/location, put a stimulus in C1 or C2

I did it by marking C1 as blue, except if blue, round, and down; C2 as yellow, except for yellow, square up So I didnt match the human subjects in the study, nor did I use the experimenters prototype

I did it more like the baboons than the humans Of course, I didnt do it by seeing slides for 800 ms and being told if I were correct or not, either

But I would have gotten the prototype right 100%, like the baboons And would matched them on Csl, too

So Im not at all sure one can draw conclusions

as to how a particular species does a particular task

And, of course, animals will try to succeed however they can Studies on homing pigeons suggest that theyll use sight for local features or global features, star navigation, smell, or magnetic currents
Depending upon what the experimenters knock out!

Thus issues of external validity

are extremely important when determining whether an animal is competent or not in any task,
and particularly in a categorization task

My parrot, Alex, learned to identify a number of objects with English labels

He could also generalize from a piece of an index card to a large 12x18 piece of paper

So we trained him on a set of items, then tested him on variations of these things Differently sized pieces of paper, wood, rawhide, etc.

But a separate issue is whether animals understand categorical classes..

Not just what is or is not wood or green or square But that each of these attributes represented a different category for the same object

That is, could an animal respond to What color? versus What shape? versus What matter?

That is, could an animal understand a hierarchical organization

in which various symbol represented different class labels

under which other classes could be categorized

Note that this task is not the same as the conditional discrimination we saw last time Remember.pick odd color if backed in white, odd shape if backed in black.

Here an animal must

attend to a multivariant item attend to the particular question determine what attribute is targeted determine which instance of many possible choices is correct (e.g., which of 7 colors or of 5 shapes) and then encode that info into a vocal label

This is the kind of task that we gave to Alex It differed from tasks given most chimps, for example, in that
it required reclassification of the same items at different times wrt different queries it went further than testing transfer of symbol labels to new items

We trained him on a small subset of items in the lab

Then tested him on everything else

COLOR QUERIES LABEL USED BY PARROT

K
K W

SHAPE

OTHER
K,K BCW

6 4 5 4 5
2

OBJECTS PRESENTED TO THE PARROT

H K W H K W H K

GH

RW

6 5 6 4

H K U,W U BPW 1 BCW

4 8 5 4 5 6 5 7 5
1

W
H

K
W H K W H

4K U,H

SHAPE QUERIES: LABEL USED BY PARROT

K
K W

H
1

COLOR

OTHER
3W 3H,3BCW

7 8 4

OBJECTS PRESENTED TO THE PARROT

H K W H K W

4
7 4
1 3W H,H 3K 1 CW 2CH

5
5

H
K W H

4
6 10 4 4 5 6 4 4
1

W UCH

K
W H K W H

4CGW UK,CK 4W

We did, of course, look at transfer as well

NOVEL COLOR/SHAPE COMBINATIONS LABEL USED BY PARROT

WHAT COLOR W OBJECTS PRESENTED TO THE PARROT W H W W K W W W W H W W RW YW BW BW(2) GW(2) ERRORS
W(1) W(1)

WHAT SHAPE 2CW(2) 2CW(2)

ERRORS
2CH(1) 2W(1)

GH
RW GyW GyK 3CK 2CW

GyW
YW

3CW(2)

4CW 5CW(2)
UW(1)

5CH
5CW 5CW(2)
UW(1)

Now, this particular set of experiments did seem to rely on language,

but in reality it merely relied on the ability to understand symbols and in principle could be done in an operant setting

First train an animal with a number of different symbols Each of which represent a particular color or shape or matter
Then train another set of symbols to represent color, shape, matter, maybe via a sorting system

Then train the animal to pick one color symbol in the presence of an object and the symbol for color
And likewise for shape And then do transfer tests on novel items Language just is easier

Now, one of the big issues that may not seem obvious so far:
The pigeon work is almost exclusively done with slides or pictures

And the work with Alex was done exclusively with 3D objects

But does an animal understand that a photo is a representation of a real-world item? Even primitive tribes dont understand that relationship;
why would animals?

But that brings into question what kind of categories were the pigeons forming

Did the categories have anything to do with real life?

Although Watanabe showed that pigeons could transfer food/not food discrimination
from objects to pictures,

his work consistently used items that were familiar to the subjects

Some work by Spetch, that we wont discuss in detail,

suggests that pigeons could associate pictures with realworld situations and locations But they have a difficult time connecting 2D w/ 3D And so does Alex

He initially called all pictures four-corner paper

And weve spent a lot of time working to try to train him on a separate category of picturetoy

But what about nonhuman primates?

Are they easier to train in this respect than birds?

Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues had to train their chimps to associate objects and photographs actually taping the photos to the objects
until the apes made the associations themselves

Note that in the baboon study on food vs nonfood discriminations,

Bovet and Vauclair report first trial responses to novel items.

Such data are critical and often are omitted

On anything other than first trial responses,

learning can be involved,

and in many studies, like this, we want to see what the animal knows before learning occurs

Note that the baboons did need significant training to discriminate the pictures of the apple versus the padlock, even after being able to work almost immediately with real 3D objects.

Such is not surprising,

given that young children without photo experience respond similarly

And in terms of real correspondence, children need to be at least 2.5 yrs old to see pictures as representations of situations

Logicallya photo isnt edible,

so why would one want to respond to it as an edible item????

Why did the baboons do less well on whole photos rather than cut-outs?
Cut-outs look more like the objects whereas photos look more unreal

So, again, there are real issues of external validity in determining animal abilities

But so far we have looked only at concrete concepts.

What about more abstract concepts? Bigger/smaller? And number?

These concepts are more difficult because they have to do not with individual items
But with the relation between or among items

And how that relationship might vary

For relative concepts, such as bigger or smaller, or lighter or darker, what is correct on one trial may be incorrect on another
Such was one of the problems when researchers first looked at relational concepts in nonhumans

An animal in an operant paradigm is, for example,

trained to choose between two samples

Grey is rewarded, and the animal learns to choose it after a number of trials

The subject is then given a transfer test of the following two choices:

Generally, the subject will initially hit the grey item, because that was what was rewarded

If response to grey is extinguished, the subject will learn to hit black

And if switched back to white and grey, may have a bit of trouble going back to grey, because that action was indeed extinguished

Eventually, it will learn the condition of when to hit and when to avoid grey,

But the subject hasnt really learned darker than as a concept

Ethological studies, although not specifically designed to contrast relative versus absolute concept learning in animals,
nevertheless suggest that some avian species can respond to natural stimuli on a relative basis

In the wild, eastern woodpewees (Contopus virens) may use the relative number of repetitions of a song type sung by a conspecific
to assess the ways in which the singer will engage in social behavior (Smith, 1988) more reps = more aggression

Some species seem able to judge the relative size and motivational state of competitors
by assessing the relative frequency (as measured in kHz) of their vocalizations and whether the ending frequency of a vocalization is relatively higher or lower than the starting frequency (Morton, 1977, 1982)

Deeper pitch usually signals a larger and an angrier animal,

And a lower ending frequency also generally signals aggression

In the laboratory, great tits

(Parus major),

after being trained to respond differentially to songs with either a large or a small number of notes,
respond to songs with intermediate numbers of notes on a relative basis (Weary, 1989)

Studies of optimal foraging also suggest

that birds base their feeding strategies on the relative amount of food they can obtain per unit of time (see Kamil, 1988; Kamil & Roitblat, 1985)

But most of these studies cannot eliminate the possibility that the animal is somehow learning about
the proper choice rather than making relative judgments

One problem is that many animal subjects appear to respond preferentially on an absolute basis Or the task is set up so that the ecological relevance only makes sense on an absolute basis

Hulses lab has shown that starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) can be trained to discriminate ascending from descending strings of notes But the birds fall apart if the strings are transposed to a different overall pitch

As we just saw, the pitch of a signal for a bird likely tells something about the overall state of the signaller,
so shifting the absolute pitch changes the overall import of the signal to such an extent that the likelihood of responding to the fine-tuning may be overwhelmed

And even if an animal is trained and tested appropriately,

The animal might not be shifted to anything other than exemplars that differ only slightly from those used in training

If an animal is trained on a set of balls and tested even on a new set of differently sized balls,
we still dont know if the concept of bigger/smaller has generalized to dumbbells and blocks.

One of the advantages of working with a talking parrot is that one can train it to tell you, for example, What color bigger/smaller? for familiar items So that it can be tested on objects it has never before seen

We could use objects larger or smaller, novel objects, objects of the same size
and see if he could respond with none, and also ask about what matter was bigger or smaller, all without additional training

Another issue about abstract concepts is that a subject has to learn to reclassify items
So it may know that these things are all blocks, But now it has to distinguish sets of three from six if it wants to show number concepts

What constitutes numerical competence?

Number can be a descriptive category chose one set from competing arrays chose with respect to more/less match-to-sample with respect to quantity

respond to one sequential series of events

Most of these do not involve exact number.

Even if subjects discriminate a specific amount, such as threeness when given a variety of choices

The subjects
may have only a recognition of pattern may be responding to mass or contour may be responding to brightness or density may actually be subitizing.

Subitizing
is a perceptual mechanism generally depends on canonical arrays

-- think dice, dominoes

-- but can be sequential is used when time constraints exist is usually approximate for larger quantities

Counting is a different matter:

Produce a standard sequence of number tags Apply a unique tag to each item to be counted

know that the last number tag used tells the quantity of interest

If arrays are not canonical, subitizing is thought to occur for quantities 4 and counting for quantity > 4

Numerical research in animals has a long history. Current thinking suggests that humans and animals share processes that involve subitizing. Various proposals exist for the mechanisms involved.e.g., object files, accumulators.

Several studies have begun to approach number competence in, e.g., monkeys and pigeons by
examining ordering of quantities

matching symbols with numbers of actions (yielding approximate values)

examining more vs. less after adding or subtracting items (yielding approximate values)

Most researchers argue that true counting can exist only with language .even for humans
And, of course, most animals do not have language. However, a few apes, dolphins, and parrots have acquired elements of human communication systems, including number labels..

So, lets talk about numerical competence in avian species

Look at the work historically.

Some of the most elegant studies with avian species was done by Koehler..

Koehler and his colleagues transferred this behavior across modalities.

Flashes of light Notes on a flute

Related work on humans..

What happens when there isnt time to count?

Researchers found that humans bottomed out at about the same level as the pigeons-

about 4

So, how might these studies relate to counting,

or at least precise number recognition?

 Geshwind showed that humans use different brain areas for labeling versus match-to-sample
Premack found that his chimpanzees had more difficulty labeling quantities than performing match-to-sample with number
Alex was already labeling shapes as 3- or 4-corner: was it a general gestalt, or maybe something more?

What could Alex really do after some training?

Now, note that Alex is not the only animal that has number concepts.

Matsuzawa has shown that chimpanzees can label quantities up to 8

Number used by Alex

1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4

Number of objects

7 1 1 1 8
2

4 1

6
1

9
1

5
6

7
1

So.we had production; What about comprehension? Conceivably, Alex might not truly understand what his number labels represented

Number Alex produces

1 2 3 4 1 5 6 n ? 1 2 3 4

Number of objects

8
1

1
1

9 10

8 8

5
6
none

10 5
1

Alexs results demonstrate competence comparable to that of nonhuman primates and young children
Matsuzawas chimpanzees can comprehend symbols up to about 8

His spontaneous use of none to represent absence of quantity is of particular note

But what about something like addition? Boysens chimps could walk around the room, look at different collections, then point to the Arabic number that represented the sum Beran showed that chimps could track more versus less when marshmallows were added or subtracted from sets

Alex gave informal evidence of being able to add sequential sounds. So we began a study to replicate the Boysen & Berntson work

Number Alex produces

1 2 3 4 5 6 n ? 1 2 3 4

Number of objects

8
1

7 8
1

7 4
2

5
6
none

1
1

7
5

What about none??

All the other work with none involved attributessame/different, relative size, or, in a sense, the ATTRIBUTE of a collection

Here, Im asking him to comment on objects that simply do not exist

His concept of zero thus seems to be that of young children,

who have some but not full comprehension of how the label is to be used

Weve done some training, one session, and he then seemed to begin to understood how to use none for zero That he caught on quickly is important, but more trials must be done

And what about 5? Data were for first trials only, and he was correct only 50% When he errs, he gets a total of 4 chancesand almost every time he said 6.

Was he subitizing 4, and seeing 6 as lots? If we gave him 10 instead of 2 s, he was 100% accurate Was he engaging in a counting-like strategy for 5?? Doesnt seem to be using an accumulator or object files or subitizing, because hes too accurate

Given that parrots and primates evolutionary history dates from the dinosaurs.

Number concepts are likely to be relatively widespread across species

Maybe numerical competence involves giving the subject the appropriate tools to express latent abilities. Certainly, enculturation is important, given evidence from untrained humans in Peru

Future directions for number work-- completing ordinality and subtraction studies training larger numbers determining if Alex will comprehend new number labels more quickly than old ones sequential sounds in younger birds and transfer to simultaneous visual

So, weve found that animals seem to have some pretty decent understanding of concepts

But I hope what came through was that the critical issue in determining these abilities has to do with experimental

design

The more the experimenter looked at the design through the eyes of the animal,

The more likely was the animal to succeed on the task

Ive emphasized my own work, because thats the easiest material for me to present

But researchers working with other animals have, as weve seen, also found striking abilities

And I suggest that if you have time,

you do a lit search on Matsuzawa and Boysen, for example, and see what their apes have accomplished

Sci-Am show on number work in chimps and rhesus