How do crows and parrots come to spontaneously perceive relations-between-relations?

Hooded crows (Corvus cornix) manufacture objects relative to a mental template

It was recently found that not only tool-specialized New Caledonian crows, but also Goffin cockatoos can manufacture physical objects in accordance with a mental template. That is, they can emulate features of existing objects when they manufacture new items. Both species spontaneously ripped pieces of card into large strips if they had previously learned that a large template was rewarded, and small strips when they previously learned that a small template was rewarded. Among New Caledonian crows, this cognitive ability was suggested as a potential mechanism underlying the transmission of natural tool designs. Here, we tested for the same ability in another non-specialised tool user-Hooded crows (Corvus cornix). Crows were exposed to pre-made template objects, varying first in colour and then in size, and were rewarded only if they chose pre-made objects that matched the template. In subsequent tests, birds were given the opportunity to manufacture versions of these objects. All three crows ripped paper pieces from the same colour material as the rewarded template, and, crucially, also manufactured objects that were more similar in size to previously rewarded, than unrewarded, templates, despite the birds being rewarded at random in both tests. Therefore, we found the ability to manufacture physical objects relative to a mental template in yet another bird species not specialized in using or making foraging tools in the wild, but with a high level of brain and cognitive development.

The Perception of Similarity, Difference and Opposition

After considering the pervasiveness of same/different relationships in Psychology and the experimental evidence of their perceptual foundation in Psychophysics and Infant and Comparative Psychology, this paper develops its main argument. Similarity and diversity do not complete the panorama since opposition constitutes a third relationship which is distinct from the other two. There is evidence of this in the previous literature investigating the perceptual basis of opposition and in the results of the two new studies presented in this paper. In these studies, the participants were asked to indicate to what extent pairs of simple bi-dimensional figures appeared to be similar, different or opposite to each other. A rating task was used in Study 1 and a pair comparison task was used in Study 2. Three main results consistently emerged: Firstly, opposition is distinct from similarity and difference which, conversely, are in a strictly inverse relationship. Secondly, opposition is specifically linked to something which points in an allocentrically opposite direction. Thirdly, alterations to the shape of an object are usually associated with the perception of diversity rather than opposition. The implications of a shift from a dyadic (same/different) to a triadic (similar/different/opposite) paradigm are discussed in the final section.

Food-caching mountain chickadees can learn abstract rules to solve a complex spatial-temporal pattern

The use of abstract rules in behavioral decisions is considered evidence of executive functions associated with higher-level cognition. Laboratory studies across taxa have shown that animals may be capable of learning abstract concepts, such as the relationships between items, but often use simpler cognitive abilities to solve tasks. Little is known about whether or how animals learn and use abstract rules in natural environments. Here, we tested whether wild, food-caching mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli) could learn an abstract rule in a spatial-temporal task in which the location of a food reward rotated daily around an 8-feeder square spatial array for up to 34 days. Chickadees initially searched for the daily food reward by visiting the most recently rewarding locations and then moving backward to visit previously rewarding feeders, using memory of previous locations. But by the end of the task, chickadees were more likely to search forward in the correct direction of rotation, moving away from the previously rewarding feeders. These results suggest that chickadees learned the direction rule for daily feeder rotation and used this to guide their decisions while searching for a food reward. Thus, chickadees appear to use an executive function to make decisions on a foraging-based task in the wild. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

Memory for own actions in parrots

The ability to recall one's past actions is a crucial prerequisite for mental self-representation and episodic memory. We studied whether blue-throated macaws, a social macaw species, can remember their previous actions. The parrots were trained to repeat four previously learned actions upon command. Test sessions included repeat trials, double repeat trials and trials without repeat intermixed to test if the parrots repeated correctly, only when requested and not relying on a representation of the last behavioral command. Following their success, the parrots also received sessions with increasing time delays preceding the repeat command and successfully mastered 12-15 s delays. The parrots successfully transferred the repeat command spontaneously at first trial to three newly trained behaviors they had never repeated before, and also succeeded in a second trial intermixed with already trained actions (untrained repeat tests). This corroborates that successful repeating is not just an artifact of intense training but that blue-throated macaws can transfer the abstract "repeat rule" to untrained action. It also implies that an important aspect of self-representation has evolved in this avian group and might be adaptive, which is consistent with the complex socio-ecological environment of parrots and previous demonstrations of their complex cognition.

You cannot find what you are not looking for: Population differences in relational reasoning are sometimes differences in inductive biases alone

Relational reasoning is a cornerstone of human cognition. Extensive work, drawing on the Relational Match to Sample paradigm (RMTS), has established that humans, at least above the age of five, are much more proficient relational reasoners than younger children or non-human animals. While sometimes differences between populations derive from differences in capacity (the capacity to create representations in a certain format or of a certain complexity, information processing capacity), other times such differences derive from different learning histories alone. Here we distinguish between two types of learning history explanations on the example of four-year-olds' failure on Premack's (1983) RMTS task: (1) that children four-year-olds have not yet created representations of the relations same and different with the properties need to support success on RMTS and (2) that four-year-olds have different inductive biases than do adults. Experiment 1 established that four-year-olds are at chance on the RMTS task we deploy as a transfer task in Experiment 2. Experiments 2A-C each provide children with a mere 8 trials of training on of one three MTS tasks (Number, Size and Identity MTS, respectively), none of which involves making matches of same to same or different to different. The very brief training (eight trials) on two of these tasks (Number MTS, Size MTS) leads to spontaneous success on RMTS in four-year-olds. Identity MTS has no effect on subsequent performance on RMTS. Given the brevity and non-relational nature of the training the successes after Number and Size MTS training must have resulted from changing inductive biases alone. Furthermore, the same two training tasks increased relational responding by adults on a related task (Kroupin & Carey, in press), whereas Identity MTS training did not, suggesting that the mechanisms through which the training changed inductive biases are at least partially continuous between ages four and adulthood.

Representations of Abstract Relations in Infancy

relations are considered the pinnacle of human cognition, allowing for analogical and logical reasoning, and possibly setting humans apart from other animal species. Recent experimental evidence showed that infants are capable of representing the abstract relations same and different, prompting the question of the format of such representations. In a propositional language of thought, abstract relations would be represented in the form of discrete symbols. Is this format available to pre-lexical infants? We report six experiments (N = 192) relying on pupillometry and investigating how preverbal 10- to 12-month-old infants represent the relation same. We found that infants' ability to represent the relation same is impacted by the number of individual entities taking part in the relation. Infants could represent that four syllables were the same and generalized that relation to novel sequences (Experiments 1 and 4). However, they failed to generalize the relation same when it involved 5 or 6 syllables (Experiments 2-3), showing that infants' representation of the relation same is constrained by the limits of working memory capacity. Infants also failed to form a representation equivalent to all the same, which could apply to a varying number of same syllables (Experiments 5-6). These results highlight important discontinuities along cognitive development. Contrary to adults, preverbal infants lack a discrete symbol for the relation same, and rather build a representation of the relation by assembling symbols for individual entities.

Hooded Crows (Corvus cornix) May Be Aware of Their Own Body Size

Body-awareness is one of the manifestations of self-awareness, expressed in the ability of people and animals to represent their own body physical properties. Relatively little work has been devoted to this phenomenon in comparison with the studies of the ability of self-recognition in the mirror, and most studies have been conducted on mammals and human infants. Crows are known to be “clever” birds, so we investigated whether hooded crows (Corvus cornix) may be aware of their own body size. We set up an experimental design in which the crows had to pass through one of three openings to reach the bait. In the first experiment, we studied whether crows prefer a larger hole if all the three are suitable for passage, and what other predictors influence their choice. In the second experiment, we assessed the ability of the crows to select a single passable hole out of three on the first attempt, even though the area of the former was smaller than that of the other two. The results of the first experiment suggest that when choosing among three passable holes, crows prefer those holes that require less effort from them, e.g., they do not need to crouch or make other additional movements. In the second experiment, three of the five crows reliably more often chose a single passable hole on the first try, despite its smaller size. We believe that these results suggest that hooded crows may be aware of their own body size.