ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the question of the way in which animals rapidly attain internal representations of the visual world. The answer remains one of the most important, difficult, and persevering problems in the cognitive and neural sciences. Pigeons are ideal subjects for this comparative enterprise because they are a biological nonmammalian system with excellent vision, and the capacity for generalized pattern recognition. Texture segregation involves the rapid and effortless detection of the visual contrast between adjacent regions of different, repetitively spaced, smaller elements. The texture Stimuli are composed of multiple small colored shapes. These elements are built from 11 colors and 12 shapes. The texture displays for the quadrant placement procedure consist of 288 separate elements arranged in an 18 x 16 array. This array is divided into four nonoverlapping 9 x 8 quadrants of elements. The texture displays for the random placement procedure consist of 384 separate elements.
