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Animal cognition
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==== Functional or associative categories ==== Perceptually unrelated stimuli may come to be responded to as members of a class if they have a common use or lead to common consequences. An oft-cited study by Vaughan (1988) provides an example.<ref>{{cite journal | vauthors = Vaughan Jr W | year = 1988 | title = Formation of equivalence sets in pigeons | journal = Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes | volume = 14 | pages = 36β42 | doi=10.1037/0097-7403.14.1.36}}</ref> Vaughan divided a large set of unrelated pictures into two arbitrary sets, A and B. Pigeons got food for pecking at pictures in set A but not for pecks at pictures in set B. After they had learned this task fairly well, the outcome was reversed: items in set B led to food and items in set A did not. Then the outcome was reversed again, and then again, and so on. Vaughan found that after 20 or more reversals, associating a reward with a few pictures in one set caused the birds to respond to the other pictures in that set without further reward as if they were thinking "if these pictures in set A bring food, the others in set A must also bring food." That is, the birds now categorized the pictures in each set as functionally equivalent. Several other procedures have yielded similar results.<ref name="Shettleworth" /><ref name="Zentall" />
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