[IKo] Organized Session: Sensibility on Imaging

[IKo-01] Animal Aesthetics: How Animals Perceive Paintings

*Shigeru Watanabe¹ (1. Keio University)

Aesthetics has three aspects, namely, discrimination or cognition, reinforcing effect or pleasure, and motor skill or creation. Here, I concentrated on the first two aspects. We can discriminate paintings by Monet from those by Picasso even when those are never seen. Pigeons can display such concept-like discriminative behavior after operant discrimination training with paintings. For these discrimination, pigeons use local cues rather than global cues. We have limited data on the reinforcing property of paintings. Java sparrows, however, show selective preference for particular paintings to other paintings. Finally, some problems in using media for animal experiments are pointed out.