Orthographic Processing in Pigeons (2016)

Examples from this study were featured in Ze Frank's most recent YouTube video about pigeons[1], and I was intrigued to discover there seem to be parallels between how pigeons identify words, and the basic methods used in training AI language models.

> Specifically, we demonstrate that pigeons trained to discriminate words from nonwords picked up on the orthographic properties that define words and used this knowledge to identify words they had never seen before. In addition, the pigeons were sensitive to the bigram frequencies of words (i.e., the common co-occurrence of certain letter pairs), the edit distance between nonwords and words, and the internal structure of words.

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1. https://youtu.be/LfYV39SKIiM