Pigeons Use High Spatial Frequencies When Memorizing Pictures

The ability of animals to visually memorize and categorize a large number of pictures is well established. Determining the kinds of information animals use to accomplish these goals has been more difficult. This experiment examined the contribution of spatial frequency information to picture memorization by pigeons. A series of grayscale pictures were notch-filtered to eliminate different portions of the spatial frequency spectrum of memorized pictures. The results indicated that the higher spatial frequencies in the pictures were most important to accurate recognition, suggesting that the detection of fine detail at the high range of pigeon visual acuity was a critical component to their memorized representations. Subsequent tests with band-pass and hybrid conflict stimuli confirmed this conclusion. It is suggested that cognitive and task demands may determine how spatial frequency is used by pigeons, with higher frequencies more important to item memorization, while lower spatial frequencies may contribute to categorization in other types of discrimination tasks.