Appreciating that varied stimuli belong to different categories requires that attention be differentially allocated to relevant and irrelevant features of those stimuli. Such selective attention ought to be definable and measurable in both humans and nonhuman animals. We first discuss the definition of attention and methods of assessing it in animals. We then introduce new experimental and computational tools for assessing attention in pigeons both during and after category learning. Deploying these tools, we have found that, as do humans, pigeons attend more to relevant than to irrelevant stimulus features during category learning. Nonetheless, postacquisition assessment reveals that, compared with human adults, pigeons less selectively attend to deterministic features in preference to probabilistic features of category members, which indicates that pigeons’ attention is more distributed. Fresh opportunities now exist for more effectively understanding the evolution and mechanisms of categorical cognition.

认识到不同的刺激属于不同的类别，需要将注意力不同地分配到这些刺激的相关和不相关的特征上。这种选择性注意应该在人类和非人类动物中都是可定义和可测量的。我们首先讨论动物注意力的定义和评估方法。然后，我们介绍了新的实验和计算工具，用于在类别学习期间和之后评估鸽子的注意力。部署这些工具后，我们发现，与人类一样，鸽子在类别学习期间更多地关注相关而非不相关的刺激特征。尽管如此，采集后评估表明，与人类成年人相比，鸽子较少选择性地关注确定性特征，而不是类别成员的概率特征，这表明鸽子的注意力更加分散。现在有新的机会可以更有效地理解分类认知的演变和机制。