Topic: pigeons

Can nonhuman animals perceive the relation-between-relations? This intriguing question has been studied over the last 40 years; nonetheless, the extent to which nonhuman species can do so remains controversial. Here, I review empirical evidence suggesting that pigeons, parrots, crows, and baboons join humans in reliably acquiring and transferring relational matching-to-sample (RMTS). Many theorists consider that RMTS captures the essence of analogy, because basic to analogy is appreciating the ‘relation between relations.’ Factors affecting RMTS performance include: prior training experience,

The ability to robustly recognize strings of letters, a cornerstone of reading, was observed in Baboons and Pigeons despite their lack of phonological and semantic knowledge. Here, we apply a comparative modeling approach to investigate the neuro-cognitive basis of Human, Baboon, and Pigeon orthographic decision behavior, addressing whether phylogenetic relatedness entails similar underlying neuro-cognitive phenotypes. We use the highly transparent Speechless Reader Model (SLR), which assumes letter string recognition based on widely accepted computational principles of predictive coding so th