The cyberbook about visual behavior in birds. Edited and Published by Dr. Robert Cook Information about my research interests My research interests are in the general area of comparative animal cognition. In particular, I have been very interested in the mechanisms of visual perception and discrimination learning in pigeons, and their comparative relations to our own perception of world.
Birds generally behave as if they perceive, learn, and act upon an object-filled visual world.
The ultimate goal of my research is to understand how these small autonomous systems form accurate perceptions of the visual world and use this information to learn about and predict relations among real world objects and events. Two graduate students are currently working in the lab. Shelley Roberts comes to us from the University of Western Ontario, and Valerie Parkison joins us from Michigan State.