Geometry and landmark representation by pigeons: evidence for species‐differences in the hemispheric organization of spatial information processing?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study, we investigated how pigeons (Columba livia) represent environmental geometry and landmark information. Birds learned to locate the centre of a square arena by means of geometric cues alone, or by means of both geometric and landmark cues. By manipulating the type of information available at training and testing, we assessed which cues the birds had encoded, and through the use of monocular occlusion we examined how the information was represented by the two brain hemispheres. Our results show that both brain hemispheres encoded geometric and landmark information. During all viewing conditions, the geometric representation was based mainly on an absolute metric for distance. The relative use of geometry and landmarks was experience dependent. With both brain hemispheres available birds relied, to a greater degree, on geometric information and used it in a more integrated way than with either hemisphere alone. Overall, our findings show a different pattern for the hemispheric encoding of geometric and landmark information by the pigeon than that previously reported for the domestic chick. Our results suggest that the organization of spatial information processing in the left and right brain hemispheres of birds may be more diverse than what is currently known.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".