Robert G. Cook - US grants

The overall purpose of Dr. Cook's research is to understand how different kinds of pattern recognition systems perceive and process visual information. This project contributes to that important purpose by studying visual perception in pigeons. Birds are ideal for comparative visual studies because flight requires accurate and rapid visual perception. This requirement, combined with the need to minimize body weight, has produced in birds a small, compact visual system that is structurally different from that of mammals. Dr. Cook's research investigates how pigeons discriminate different kinds of computer-generated visual stimuli. He is using a new type of visual discrimination task, which specifically allows the direct comparison of visual perception in pigeons and humans. The results of these experiments will reveal whether the mechanisms proposed for vision in humans are present in pigeons, or whether the birds use an entirely different set of mechanisms for producing their extraordinarily keen vision. Thus, the project will supply evidence on the type, number, range and generality of specific visual information-processing principles and mechanisms. Such information will lead to a better understanding of vision in humans and aid in the implementation of visual pattern recognition in computers. This information will also be useful for developing diagnostic and remedial procedures for visual-related health problems in humans, such as computerized visual prostheses or substitutes for the blind.

9307247 Cook The goal of this research is to understand how animals, including humans, rapidly see and recognize visual objects. Dr. Cook's new research elaborates on his prior NSF-supported research looking at the perception and processing of textured stimuli by pigeons. These birds are ideal for comparative visual studies because the demands for accurate and rapid perception during flight, in conjunction with the need to minimize body weight, have caused them to evolve very small, but powerful, visual systems. This makes them a rich source of comparative information about how small nervous systems solve the very complex problems of perception. In conjunction with research investigating humans and other animals, the results will help to identify those general rules and mechanisms shared by many species and those that are unique. One implication of the prior work was that the early stages of visual processing in pigeons and humans share many common characteristics. The new research continues to examine this issue by investigating the contributions of stimulus-driven and subject-driven processes in the discrimination of multi-element stimuli by pigeons, and by humans when appropriate. Besides its psychological implications, information from this research will have potential practical applications in the engineering of small, self- sufficient, intelligent robots and the development of compact visual prostheses for the visually impaired.

The ultimate goal of this research is to understand how small complex systems, like birds, learn about how the world operates (i.e., relations between objects and events) and use this knowledge to flexibly respond to new situations. The specific objective of the current research is to examine how pigeons learn to respond to the general and specific properties of same and different relations between various types of visual stimuli and their arrangement. Recognizing difference and similarity is among the oldest and most fundamental of psychological discriminations, with important implications for our understanding of perception, conceptual behavior, intelligence-related behaviors, and their general mediation by language. Pigeons are ideal for such comparative cognitive studies because they evolved small, powerful, central nervous systems capable of exceptional visual perception and complex discrimination learning capacities.

This research will immediately impact our understanding of the psychological mechanisms by which complex animals, including humans, learn to use concepts. This research is part of the general effort to understand how the brain generates rule-governed behavior, the long-term outcome of which will have implications for educational system. In addition, understanding the mechanisms of how small biological systems work could be key to the practical engineering of similar "smart" systems for a variety of purposes (e.g., compact visual prostheses for the blind, autonomous robots for search and rescue, efficient information transmission algorithms). This comparative research is also part of a larger scientific enterprise by many scientists to understand the evolution and mechanisms of cognition and behavior by investigating the distribution of behavioral similarities and differences among a wide variety of animal species.

Non-Technical Summary

The goal of this research is to understand how small complex systems learn about the world, in particular how they perceive objects and the relations between these objects and events and how they use this knowledge to flexibly respond to new situations. The specific objectives of the current research are to advance three complementary lines of inquiry examining in detail the behavioral mechanisms of same/different concept learning, stimulus memory, and motion-based object perception in pigeons. These are important issues because recognizing difference and similarity is among the oldest and most fundamental of psychological discriminations, with important implications for understanding of perception, conceptual behavior, intelligence-related behaviors, and their mediation by language. Understanding the processes underlying the large visual memory capacity of these animals will also advance our knowledge of how brains are capable of encoding large amounts of information and how and why they fail as a function of aging and disease. Finally, understanding the mechanisms underlying visual perception ranks among the most demanding and difficult of biological issues. Examining how these mechanisms operate in a visually sophisticated animal system is a key step towards solving such questions. Pigeons are ideal for such comparative cognitive studies because they evolved small, powerful, central nervous systems capable of exceptional visual perception and complex discrimination learning.

This research will immediately impact our understanding of the psychological mechanisms by which complex animals, including humans, use the combination of specific memories and concepts to guide behavior. This research is part of the general effort to understand how the brain generates and controls behavior. An understanding of the mechanisms of how small biological systems work could be key to the practical engineering of similar "smart" systems for a variety of purposes (e.g., compact visual prostheses for the blind, autonomous robots for search and rescue, efficient information transmission algorithms). This type of comparative research is also part of a larger scientific enterprise by many scientists to understand the evolution and mechanisms of cognition and behavior and their functions in the natural world by investigating the distribution of behavioral similarities and differences among a wide variety of animal species in both laboratory and field settings.

The goal of this research is to understand how animals, and more specifically birds, perceive and learn about the world. In particular, the Principal Investigator is investigating how birds perceive objects and whether the cognitive and brain mechanisms involved are the same as or different from those of humans and other animals. Pigeons are ideal for such comparative cognitive studies because they have evolved small, powerful, central nervous systems capable of exceptional visual perception and complex discrimination learning. The objectives of the research are to advance three related lines of investigations looking at how pigeons detect and recognize the edges of objects, detect and recognize changes in an object when it moves or rotates, and how complex objects are broken by into smaller parts for the purposes of recognition. These are universally agreed on by vision scientists to be fundamental issues in understanding the mechanisms of visual perception. Visual perception continues to be one the most demanding and difficult biological riddles to solve. For example, it is still beyond our capacities to build a visually-directed robot that can match a chickadee''s ability to move through a visually noisy forest canopy. Examining these perceptual mechanisms in small visually sophisticated animals, like birds, is a key step towards solving such questions. This research will immediately impact our understanding of the visual, neural, psychological mechanisms by which complex animals, including humans, perceive the world. This type of comparative research is also part of a larger scientific enterprise by many scientists to understand the evolution and mechanisms of cognition and behavior and their functions in the natural world by investigating the distribution of behavioral similarities and differences among a wide variety of animal species in both laboratory and field settings. Beyond its scientific importance to theories of animal behavior, the proposed research has broader impacts and applications to human health, welfare, and education. This research is part of the general effort to understand how the brain generates and controls behavior. An understanding of the mechanisms of how small biological systems work may lead to the practical engineering of similar ?smart? systems for a variety of purposes (e.g., compact visual prostheses for the blind, autonomous robots for search and rescue, efficient information transmission algorithms). Activities related to the research will be used to educate and train students at the graduate, undergraduate, secondary and primary levels of education. Outreach programs using the internet will also be pursued.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Vision is one of the enduring puzzles of modern cognitive science and elucidating the mechanisms of visual object perception presents a particular challenge. Nothing in the reflected light that arrives at the retina contains direct information about the location, shape, size, or number of objects in view. Understanding how the brain processes visual stimuli to derive this information would be a major advance in visual science. Because birds are active and mobile, avian visual systems must resolve the same problems that have driven theoretical advances in human and machine vision research. Examining these issues in such small, non-mammalian systems adds substantially to the development of a unified general theory of vision. Using our well-developed psychophysical techniques based on discrimination learning, we propose to evaluate this problem by examining in how starlings and pigeons process visual stimuli in controlled analytical contexts. This will be the first parallel comparison of visual processing in two avian species. The overall objective of this application is to investigate and compare how these species solve central problems of visual cognition and object perception as related to the processing of illumination and shading, edge processing and figural grouping, and the recognition and classification of behavior and action. Our specific aims include: 1) equating our procedures for the comparative examination of visual processing in these species; 2) examining the processing of surface shading and its contributions to object and depth perception; 3) examining edge and figural grouping processes in shape perception; and 4) examining the mechanisms of visually-mediated action and movement recognition. The current project is a part of our long-term objective to understand the proximate psychological, computational and neural mechanisms by which different pattern recognition systems perceive, recognize, categorize, integrate, understand, and respond to complex visual information. The unique combination of visual power, small size, and different neural organization exemplified by birds offers a special scientific opportunity for better understanding this extremely important sensory modality and how it functions and is implemented across different classes of animals. This comparison will address whether there are only a few biologically plausible mechanisms for rapid visual processing of objects or whether there are multiple routes to functional vision in highly mobile organisms. Because there is strong evolutionary pressure for highly efficient and rapid computation of visual information placed on the small, highly visual brain of birds, our results will contribute directly to the pracical development of treatments, corrective solutions or prostheses for humans with a variety of visual disorders and to the design of visual sensors for self-guided bio-mimetic robotic devices.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is a highly competitive, federal fellowship program. GRFP helps ensure the vitality and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and in STEM education. The GRFP provides three years of financial support for the graduate education of individuals who have demonstrated their potential for significant research achievements in STEM and STEM education. This award supports the NSF Graduate Fellows pursuing graduate education at this GRFP institution.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.