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.
