POSTER PRESENTATION Open Access Categorical perception in monkeys: modeling implicit learning of discrete categories

Monkeys can learn discrete categories (such as ‘cat ’ / ‘dog’) while performing a behavioral task without explicit instruction related to the categories [1]. The reward pro-tocol is such that the monkey always gains some reward if it performs correctly an easy learnable task, but it can considerably increase its cumulative reward if it can make a proper use of categorical cues, which requires being able to distinguish between the two categories. These experiments have not allowed to compare the acquired knowledge of categories with the standard phe-nomenon of categorical perception [2]. Notably, the main characteristic features of categorical perception show up in the psychophysics when the stimuli are ambiguous, near the boundary between categories in stimulus space. On the theoretical side, these features have been show