Lecture Notes: Pigeons' Discrimination of Art

Abstract Overview

• Humans can create art and distinguish between good and bad art.
• Study investigates pigeons’ ability to distinguish between good and bad children's paintings.
• Human observers pre-classified children's paintings as good or bad based on aesthetics.
• Pigeons were trained to peck at good paintings using operant conditioning.

Experiment Methodology

• Training Phase: Pigeons learned to discriminate between good and bad paintings through reinforcement.
• Testing Phase: Pigeons were presented with novel paintings to see if they could generalize the learned discrimination.

Key Findings

• Pigeons successfully discriminated between novel good and bad paintings.
• Discrimination was maintained when paintings were:
  • Reduced in size
  • Partially occluded
• Discrimination decreased when paintings were:
  • Converted to grayscale
  • Converted to mosaic (spatial frequency disrupted)
• Pigeons used color and pattern cues for discrimination.
• Partial occlusion tests showed pigeons did not rely on specific parts of the paintings.

Second Experiment

• Pigeons learned to discriminate between watercolor and pastel paintings.
• Generalization to novel paintings was observed.
• Similar tests (size reduction, grayscale, mosaic processing, partial occlusion) were conducted with consistent findings.

Conclusions

• Pigeons are capable of learning the concept of 'good' pictures according to human judgment.
• They can distinguish abstract visual stimuli using both color and pattern cues.
• Results suggest non-human animals may have the ability to learn human-defined concepts such as beauty.

Acknowledgments

• Thanks to the elementary school of Keio for children's paintings.
• Supported by the Program of Global COE (Center of Excellence) in Japan.

Author Information

• Author: Shigeru Watanabe
• Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan
• Correspondence: Email Shigeru Watanabe.

Citation

• Watanabe, S. (2010). Pigeons can discriminate good and bad paintings by children. Animal Cognition, 13, 75–85.

Related Information

• Various references to scholarly articles provided for further reading on related subjects and studies.