Perception of Partly Occluded Figures by Baboons (Papio Papio)

Abstract

Comparative literature provides conflicting findings whether animals experience amodal completion. Five experiments were conducted to verify if baboons perceive partly occluded objects as complete. The first three experiments used a go/no-go procedure and a video monitor for stimulus presentation. These experiments failed to reveal amodal completion, suggesting that the stimuli were processed as 2-D images rather than 3-D objects. In contrast, completion was demonstrated in a fourth experiment with cardboard stimuli in a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) discrimination task presented in a Wisconsin General Test Apparatus. Although in experiment 5 the same 2AFC procedure was used as in experiment 4, completion was absent when the stimuli were shown with a computer graphic system. The results suggest that baboons share with humans the ability for amodal completion, but also underline some procedural factors that might affect the elicitation of this capacity.