Categories, concepts, and calls: Auditory perceptual mechanisms and cognitive abilities across different types of birds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although involving different animals, preparations, and objectives, our laboratories (Sturdy’s and Cook’s) are mutually interested in category perception and concept formation. The Sturdy laboratory has a history of studying perceptual categories in songbirds, while Cook laboratory has a history of studying abstract concept formation in pigeons. Recently, we undertook a suite of collaborative projects to combine our investigations to examine abstract concept formation in songbirds, and perception of songbird vocalizations in pigeons. This talk will include our recent findings of songbird category perception, songbird abstract concept formation (same/different task), and early results from pigeons’ processing of songbird vocalizations in a same/different task. Our findings indicate that (1) categorization in birds seems to be most heavily influenced by acoustic, rather than genetic or experiential factors (2) songbirds treat their vocalizations as perceptual categories, both at the level of the note and species/whole call, (3) chickadees, like pigeons, can perceive abstract, same-different relations, and (4) pigeons are not as good at discriminating chickadee vocalizations as songbirds (chickadees and finches). Our findings suggest that although there are commonalities in complex auditory processing among birds, there are potentially important comparative differences between songbirds and non-songbirds in their treatment of certain types of auditory objects.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".