Scene gist categorization in humans is rapid, accurate, and tuned to the fundamental statistical regularities in the visual world. However, no studies have investigated whether scene gist categorization is a general process shared across species, or whether it may be influenced by species-specific adaptive specializations relying on specific low-level scene statistical regularities of the environment. Although pigeons form many types of categorical judgments, little research has examined

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... ' scene categorization, and no studies have examined pigeons' ability to do so rapidly. In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained to discriminate between either two basic-level categories (beach vs. mountain) or a superordinate level natural versus a man-made scene category distinction (beach vs. street). The birds successfully learned both tasks to a high degree of accuracy, and transferred their discrimination to novel images. Furthermore, the pigeons successfully discriminated stimuli presented in the .2-.35 s duration range. This indicates that pigeons, a highly divergent species from humans, are also capable of rapid scene categorization, but that they require longer stimulus durations than humans, who can successfully categorize scenes with durations of .027 s or less. Experiment 2 examined whether pigeons make use of complex statistical regularities during scene gist categorization across multiple viewpoints. Pigeons were trained with the two natural categories from Experiment 1 (beach vs. mountain) with zenith (90°), bird's eye (45°), and terrestrial (0°) viewpoints. A sizable portion of the variability in pigeon categorization performance was explained by the systematic variation in scene category-specific statistical regularities, which has also been found with human scene categorization performance. In sum, the current study suggests that rapid scene categorization is a process that is shared across pigeons and humans, but shows a degree of adaptive specialization.