Can pigeons trained to tell Monet from Picasso also distinguish unfamiliar paintings by these artists?

Details

In this animal learning experiment, researchers trained pigeons to discriminate between color slides of Monet and Picasso paintings, then tested them with unfamiliar works. Their success with the new paintings suggests that their responses were not limited to the exact images used in training. The learned distinction also extended from Monet to paintings by Cézanne and Renoir, and from Picasso to paintings by Braque and Matisse.

Turning the images upside down disrupted discrimination for Monet paintings but not for Picasso paintings. The authors suggested that depicted objects might have guided the pigeons’ responses to impressionist paintings, but not their responses to cubist paintings. That explanation remains tentative: the results suggest visual categorization, rather than demonstrating a human-like understanding of art. The abstract does not report the number of pigeons or how accurately they performed.