Attention to relevant stimulus features in a categorization task helps to optimize performance. However, the relationship between attention and categorization is not fully understood. For example, even when human adults and young children exhibit comparable categorization behavior, adults tend to attend selectively during learning, whereas young children tend to attend diffusely (Deng & Sloutsky, 2016). Here, we used a comparative approach to investigate the link between attention and categorization in two different species. Given the noteworthy categorization ability of avian species, we compared the attentional profiles of pigeons and human adults. We gave human adults (Experiment 1) and pigeons (Experiment 2) a categorization task that could be learned on the basis of either one deterministic feature (encouraging selective attention) or multiple probabilistic features (encouraging distributed attention). Both humans and pigeons relied on the deterministic feature to categorize the stimuli, albeit humans did so to a much greater degree. Furthermore, computational modeling revealed that most of the adults exhibited maximal selectivity, whereas pigeons tended to distribute their attention among several features. Our findings indicate that human adults focus their attention on deterministic information and filter less predictive information, but pigeons do not. Implications for the underlying brain mechanisms of attention and categorization are discussed.

注意分类任务中的相关刺激特征有助于优化性能。然而，注意力和分类之间的关系还没有完全理解。例如，即使成人和幼儿表现出类似的分类行为，成人在学习过程中也倾向于选择性地参与，而幼儿则倾向于分散参与（Deng & Sloutsky，2016）。在这里，我们使用比较方法来研究两种不同物种的注意力和分类之间的联系。鉴于鸟类物种的显着分类能力，我们比较了鸽子和人类成年人的注意力特征。我们为成人（实验 1）和鸽子（实验 2）提供了一项分类任务，该任务可以基于一个确定性特征（鼓励选择性注意）或多个概率特征（鼓励分布式注意）进行学习。人类和鸽子都依赖确定性特征来对刺激进行分类，尽管人类这样做的程度要高得多。此外，计算模型显示大多数成年人表现出最大的选择性，而鸽子倾向于将注意力分散在几个特征上。我们的研究结果表明，成年人将注意力集中在确定性信息上，过滤掉较少的预测性信息，而鸽子则不然。讨论了注意力和分类的潜在大脑机制的含义。