Behavioral studies of pigeons probe the higher levels of biological vision. Preliminary studies with complex visual stimuli (including natural scenes) have shown great similarities between pigeon vision and early human vision, despite an evolutionary gap of 100 million years. This suggests the existence of extraordinarily robust biological solutions to visual analysis. Further experiments on visual shape categorization are to be performed on human and pigeon subjects. The goals are 1) to infer underlying algorithms in the two species; 2) to examine adaptation of these algorithms to the circumstances of their use; 3) to formalize the algorithms and their adaptive capacities mathematically; 4) to synthesize biological visual categorization on a computer; and 5) to develop experimental procedures with the long-term goal of creating artificial visual machines.
