Research Aims

My research interests are in the general area of comparative animal cognition. In particular, I have been very interested in the mechanisms of visual perception and discrimination learning in pigeons, and their comparative relations to our own perception of world. Birds generally behave as if they perceive, learn, and act upon an object-filled visual world. The ultimate goal of my research is to understand how these small autonomous systems form accurate perceptions of the visual world and use this information to learn about and predict relations among real world objects and events. My research examines these questions by looking at the visual and cognitive mechanisms of one highly visual non-mammalian system -- the pigeon. Pigeons are ideal for comparative cognitive studies because the demands to minimize body weight for flight have caused them to evolve small, compact, and powerful central nervous systems capable of exceptional visual perception and the learning of complex discriminations, but that are organized very differently from well studied mammalian systems (i.e., rats, cats, monkeys).

Interests

• Same-Different Concept Learning
• Equivalence Class Formation
• Object Perception
• Picture Perception
• Motion Perception
• Texture Perception
• Neural Mechanisms underlying these behaviors

Students

My lab currently funds two graduate students:

• Matt Murphy
• Angie C. Koban

A number of undergraduate students work or have worked in my lab:

• Dan Brooks
• Carie Fowler
• Kevin Beale
• Eliza Lipkin-Gordon
• Greg Schmidt (Now a Graduate Student at USF)