Here?s Looking at You, Kitty

The ability to classify images seems to extend beyond mammals. Pigeons?one of the world?s best-studied animals?have demonstrated their ability to distinguish between pictures of country and urban landscapes, letters of the alphabet, cartoon characters, and paintings by Monet and Picasso. It?s not clear, however, whether the pigeons, like humans and the Google computer, create separate mental conceptions for each category of object they gaze upon or if they rely on some lower-order visual cue. (In one study, the pigeons tricked laboratory scientists by relying on irrelevant features of the background to distinguish between pictures with and without humans.) There is another difficulty in comparing the Google computer to animals. The Google computers? cat-recognition ability was notable because they learned to deduce the presence of felines without human training. Without subjecting animals to human training, by contrast, there?s no way of knowing what the beasts are thinking.

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