Keller and Schoenfeld (1950) proposed a unique behavioral perspective on conceptualization. They suggested that concepts refer solely to an organism's behavior and to the conditions under which it occurs; as such, conceptual behavior need be neither verbal nor uniquely human. Herrnstein and Loveland (1964) advanced that behavioral perspective by deploying an elegant training procedure to teach visual concepts to pigeons. Keller and Schoenfeld's perspective and Herrnstein and Loveland's methodology have inspired my own research into conceptualization by pigeons. Using a system of arbitrary visual tokens, my colleagues and I have built ever-expanding nonverbal "vocabularies" in pigeons through a variety of different concept learning tasks. Pigeons have reliably categorized as many as 2000 individual photographs from as many as 16 different human object categories, even without the benefit of seeing an item twice. Our formal model of conceptualization effectively embraces 25 years of empirical evidence as well as generates novel predictions for both pigeon and human conceptual behavior. Comparative study should continue to elucidate the commonalities and disparities between human and nonhuman conceptual behavior; it should also explicate the relationship between associative learning, object recognition, conceptualization, and language.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 21. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 06 April 2023.
All research outputs
#2,026,996
of 28,858,989 outputs
Outputs from Behavioural Processes
#182
of 1,807 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#25,036
of 290,386 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Behavioural Processes
#4
of 34 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 28,858,989 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 92nd percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,807 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 16.6. This one has done well, scoring higher than 89% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 34 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 88% of its contemporaries.
