Ways of thinking: from crows to children and back again

Inhibition and cognitive flexibility are related to prediction of one's own future preferences in young British and Chinese children

The ability to shift from current to future perspective is pivotal to future-oriented cognition. With two distinct cultural groups, UK (N = 92) and China (N = 90), we investigated 3 to 5-year-olds' understanding of preference changes occurring within themselves and their peers (another child). We administered a battery of representative tasks of executive function and theory of mind to examine their underlying relationships with children's ability to predict future preferences. British 3-year-olds outperformed Chinese children in predicting future preferences, while no country differences were observed between the 4- and 5-year-olds. Across the UK and China, children were more accurate when predicting for their peers than for themselves. They were also more accurate when their current preferences were identified first, i.e. before answering questions about the future. Chinese children outperformed their British counterparts on inhibition and cognitive flexibility tasks whereas there were no Eastern and Western differences in their theory of mind abilities. After controlling for age and children's knowledge of generic adult preferences, children's performance in the inhibition and cognitive flexibility tasks were significantly correlated with the prediction of their own future preferences, but they were not significantly correlated when predicting for a peer. These results are discussed in relation to the conflicts between multiple perspectives and the cognitive correlates of future-oriented cognition.

Teamwork Makes the String Work: A Pilot Test of the Loose String Task with African Crested Porcupines (Hystrix cristata)

Comparative researchers have heavily focused their studies of social cognition on species that live in large social groups, while neglecting other potential predictors of social cognition. African crested porcupines (Hystrix cristata) are relatively rare among mammals in that they are cooperative breeders that pair for life. Little is known about their social cognition, but they are good candidates for exploring cooperative behavior due to the need to coordinate behavior to cooperatively raise young. Cooperation, as defined in this study, is the process by which two or more participants perform independent actions on an object to obtain a reward for all parties. Humans are thought to outperform all other species in the frequency and magnitude of cooperative behaviors. Yet, only by studying a variety of species can researchers fully understand the likely selection pressures for cooperation, such as cooperative breeding. Here, we pilot tested the feasibility of the popular loose-string task with a mated pair of African crested porcupines, a task that required the porcupines to cooperatively pull ropes to access an out of reach platform baited with food rewards. Other species presented with this task were able to work together to receive rewards but did not always demonstrate understanding of the role of their partner. The porcupines achieved success but did not appear to coordinate their actions or solicit behavior from their partner. Thus, similar to other species, they may achieve success in this task without taking their partner’s role into account. This study demonstrates that the loose string task can be used to assess cooperation in porcupines. However, further experiments are needed to assess the porcupine’s understanding of their partner’s role under this paradigm.

A conceptual framework for consciousness

This article argues that consciousness has a logically sound, explanatory framework, different from typical accounts that suffer from hidden mysticism. The article has three main parts. The first describes background principles concerning information processing in the brain, from which one can deduce a general, rational framework for explaining consciousness. The second part describes a specific theory that embodies those background principles, the Attention Schema Theory. In the past several years, a growing body of experimental evidence-behavioral evidence, brain imaging evidence, and computational modeling-has addressed aspects of the theory. The final part discusses the evolution of consciousness. By emphasizing the specific role of consciousness in cognition and behavior, the present approach leads to a proposed account of how consciousness may have evolved over millions of years, from fish to humans. The goal of this article is to present a comprehensive, overarching framework in which we can understand scientifically what consciousness is and what key adaptive roles it plays in brain function.

The Ape That Lived to Tell the Tale. The Evolution of the Art of Storytelling and Its Relationship to Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind

Engaging in the art of creating and telling stories is a defining behaviour of humankind. Humans have been sharing stories with each other, with and without words, since the dawn of recorded history, but the cognitive foundations of the behaviour can be traced deeper into our past. The emergence of stories can be strongly linked to Mental Time Travel (the ability to recall the past and imagine the future) and plays a key role in our ability to communicate past, present and future scenarios with other individuals, within and beyond our lifetimes. Stories are products engraved within the concept of time, constructed to elucidate the past experiences of the self, but designed with the future in mind, thus imparting lessons of such experiences to the receiver. By being privy to the experiences of others, humans can imagine themselves in a similar position to the protagonist of the story, thus mentally learning from an experience they might have never encountered other than in the mind's eye. Evolutionary Psychology investigates how the engagement in artistic endeavours by our ancestors in the Pleistocene granted them an advantage when confronted with obstacles that challenged their survival or reproductive fitness and questions whether art is an adaptation of the human mind or a spandrel of other cognitive adaptations. However, little attention has been placed on the cognitive abilities that might have been imperative for the development of art. Here, we examine the relationship between art, storytelling, Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind (i.e., the ability to attribute mental states to others). We suggest that Mental Time Travel played a key role in the development of storytelling because through stories, humans can fundamentally transcend their present condition, by being able to imagine different times, separate realities, and place themselves and others anywhere within the time space continuum. We argue that the development of a Theory of Mind also sparked storytelling practises in humans as a method of diffusing the past experiences of the self to others whilst enabling the receiver to dissociate between the past experiences of others and their own, and to understand them as lessons for a possible future. We propose that when artistic products rely on storytelling in form and function, they ought to be considered separate from other forms of art whose appreciation capitalise on our aesthetic preferences.

Beyond the Chicken: Alternative Avian Models for Developmental Physiological Research

Biomedical research focusing on physiological, morphological, behavioral, and other aspects of development has long depended upon the chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) as a key animal model that is presumed to be typical of birds and generally applicable to mammals. Yet, the modern chicken in its many forms is the result of artificial selection more intense than almost any other domesticated animal. A consequence of great variation in genotype and phenotype is that some breeds have inherent aberrant physiological and morphological traits that may show up relatively early in development (e.g., hypertension, hyperglycemia, and limb defects in the broiler chickens). While such traits can be useful as models of specific diseases, this high degree of specialization can color general experimental results and affect their translational value. Against this background, in this review we first consider the characteristics that make an animal model attractive for developmental research (e.g., accessibility, ease of rearing, size, fecundity, development rates, genetic variation, etc.). We then explore opportunities presented by the embryo to adult continuum of alternative bird models, including quail, ratites, songbirds, birds of prey, and corvids. We conclude by indicating that expanding developmental studies beyond the chicken model to include additional avian groups will both validate the chicken model as well as potentially identify even more suitable avian models for answering questions applicable to both basic biology and the human condition.

Preschool children's use of perceptual-motor knowledge and hierarchical representational skills for tool making

Although other animals can make simple tools, the expanded and complex material culture of humans is unprecedented in the animal kingdom. Tool making is a slow and late-developing ability in humans, and preschool children find making tools to solve problems very challenging. This difficulty in tool making might be related to the lack of familiarity with the tools and may be overcome by children's long term perceptual-motor knowledge. Thus, in this study, the effect of tool familiarity on tool making was investigated with a task in which 5-to-6-year-old children (n = 75) were asked to remove a small bucket from a vertical tube. The results show that children are better at tool making if the tool and its relation to the task are familiar to them (e.g., soda straw). Moreover, we also replicated the finding that hierarchical complexity and tool making were significantly related. Results are discussed in light of the ideomotor approach.

Testing two competing hypotheses for Eurasian jays' caching for the future

Previous research reported that corvids preferentially cache food in a location where no food will be available or cache more of a specific food in a location where this food will not be available. Here, we consider possible explanations for these prospective caching behaviours and directly compare two competing hypotheses. The Compensatory Caching Hypothesis suggests that birds learn to cache more of a particular food in places where that food was less frequently available in the past. In contrast, the Future Planning Hypothesis suggests that birds recall the ‘what–when–where’ features of specific past events to predict the future availability of food. We designed a protocol in which the two hypotheses predict different caching patterns across different caching locations such that the two explanations can be disambiguated. We formalised the hypotheses in a Bayesian model comparison and tested this protocol in two experiments with one of the previously tested species, namely Eurasian jays. Consistently across the two experiments, the observed caching pattern did not support either hypothesis; rather it was best explained by a uniform distribution of caches over the different caching locations. Future research is needed to gain more insight into the cognitive mechanism underpinning corvids’ caching for the future.

A novel test of flexible planning in relation to executive function and language in young children

In adult humans, decisions involving the choice and use of tools for future events typically require episodic foresight. Previous studies suggest some non-human species are capable of future planning; however, these experiments often cannot fully exclude alternative learning explanations. Here, we used a novel tool-use paradigm aiming to address these critiques to test flexible planning in 3- to 5-year-old children, in relation to executive function and language abilities. In the flexible planning task, children were not verbally cued during testing, single trials avoided consistent exposure to stimulus-reward relationships, and training trials provided experience of a predictable return of reward. Furthermore, unlike most standard developmental studies, we incorporated short delays before and after tool choice. The critical test choice included two tools with equal prior reward experience-each only functional in one apparatus. We tested executive function and language abilities using several standardized tasks. Our results echoed standard developmental research: 4- and 5-year-olds outperformed 3-year-olds on the flexible planning task, and 5-year-old children outperformed younger children in most executive function and language tasks. Flexible planning performance did not correlate with executive function and language performance. This paradigm could be used to investigate flexible planning in a tool-use context in non-human species.

Reflections on the spoon test

In this paper, we shall use Tulving's seminal empirical and theoretical research including the 'Spoon Test' to explore memory and mental time travel and its origins and role in planning for the future. We will review the comparative research on future planning and episodic foresight in pre-verbal children and non-verbal animals to explore how this may be manifest as wordless thoughts.

An Evolutionary Perspective on Why Food Overconsumption Impairs Cognition

Brain structures and neuronal networks that mediate spatial navigation, decision-making, sociality, and creativity evolved, in part, to enable success in food acquisition. Here, I discuss evidence suggesting that the reason that overconsumption of energy-rich foods negatively impacts cognition is that signaling pathways that evolved to respond adaptively to food scarcity are relatively disengaged in the setting of continuous food availability. Obesity impairs cognition and increases the risk for some psychiatric disorders and dementias. Moreover, maternal and paternal obesity predispose offspring to poor cognitive outcomes by epigenetic molecular mechanisms. Neural signaling pathways that evolved to bolster cognition in settings of food insecurity can be stimulated by intermittent fasting and exercise to support the cognitive health of current and future generations.

Exploring the relative contributions of reward-history and functionality information to children's acquisition of the Aesop's fable task

Investigation of tool-using behaviours has long been a means by which to explore causal reasoning in children and nonhuman animals. Much of the recent research has focused on the “Aesop’s Fable” paradigm, in which objects must be dropped into water to bring a floating reward within reach. An underlying problem with these, as with many causal reasoning studies, is that functionality information and reward history are confounded: a tool that is functionally useful is also rewarded, while a tool that is not functionally useful is not rewarded. It is therefore not possible to distinguish between behaviours motivated by functional understanding of the properties of the objects involved, and those influenced by reward-history. Here, we devised an adapted version of the Aesop’s Fable paradigm which decouples functionality information and reward history by making use of situations in which the use of a particular tool should have enabled a subject to obtain (or not obtain) a reward, but the outcome was affected by the context. Children aged 4–11 were given experience of a range of tools that varied independently in whether they were functional or non-functional and rewarded or non-rewarded. They were then given the opportunity to choose which tools they would like to use in a test trial, thereby providing an assessment of whether they relied on information about functionality or the reward history associated with the object or a combination of the two. Children never significantly used reward history to drive their choices of tools, while the influence of functionality information increased with age, becoming dominant by age 7. However, not all children behaved in a consistent manner, and even by 10 years of age, only around a third exclusively used functionality as a basis for their decision-making. These findings suggest that from around the age of 7-years, children begin to emphasize functionality information when learning in novel situations, even if competing reward information is available, but that even in the oldest age-group, most children did not exclusively use functionality information.

Young children do not require perceptual-motor feedback to solve Aesop's Fable tasks

Aesop’s Fable tasks—in which subjects drop objects into a water-filled tube to raise the water level and obtain out-of-reach floating rewards —have been used to test for causal understanding of water displacement in both young children and non-human animals. However, a number of alternative explanations for success on these tasks have yet to be ruled out. One hypothesis is that subjects may respond to perceptual-motor feedback: repeating those actions that bring the reward incrementally closer. Here, we devised a novel, forced-choice version of the Aesop’s Fable task to assess whether subjects can solve water displacement tasks when this type of feedback is removed. Subjects had to select only one set of objects, or one type of tube, into which all objects were dropped at once, and the effect the objects had on the water level was visually concealed. In the current experiment, fifty-five 5–9 year old children were tested in six different conditions in which we either varied object properties (floating vs. sinking, hollow vs. solid, large vs. small and too large vs. small objects), the water level (high vs. low) and/or the tube size (narrow vs. wide). We found that children aged 8–9 years old were able to solve most of the water displacement tasks on their first trial, without any opportunity for feedback, suggesting that they mentally simulated the results of their actions before making a choice. Children aged 5–7 years solved two conditions on their first trial (large vs. small objects and high- vs. low-water levels), and learnt to solve most of the remaining conditions over five trials. The developmental pattern shown here is comparable to previous studies using the standard Aesop’s Fable task, where eight year olds are typically successful from their first trial and 5–7 year olds learn to pass over five trials. Thus, our results indicate that children do not depend on perceptual-motor feedback to solve these water displacement tasks. The forced-choice paradigm we describe could be used comparatively to test whether or not non-human animals require visual feedback to solve water displacement tasks.

Memory, mental time travel and The Moustachio Quartet

Mental time travel allows us to revisit our memories and imagine future scenarios, and this is why memories are not only about the past, but they are also prospective. These episodic memories are not a fixed store of what happened, however, they are reassessed each time they are revisited and depend on the sequence in which events unfold. In this paper, we shall explore the complex relationships between memory and human experience, including through a series of novels 'The Moustachio Quartet' that can be read in any order. To do so, we shall integrate evidences from science and the arts to explore the subjective nature of memory and mental time travel, and argue that it has evolved primarily for prospection as opposed to retrospection. Furthermore, we shall question the notion that mental time travel is a uniquely human construct, and argue that some of the best evidence for the evolution of mental time travel comes from our distantly related cousins, the corvids, that cache food for the future and rely on long-lasting and highly accurate memories of what, where and when they stored their stashes of food.

The development of support intuitions and object causality in juvenile Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius)

Knowledge about the causal relationship between objects has been studied extensively in human infants, and more recently in adult animals using differential looking time experiments. How knowledge about object support develops in non-human animals has yet to be explored. Here, we studied the ontogeny of support relations in Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius), a bird species known for its sophisticated cognitive abilities. Using an expectancy violation paradigm, we measured looking time responses to possible and impossible video and image stimuli. We also controlled for experience with different support types to determine whether the emergence of support intuitions is dependent upon specific interactions with objects, or if reasoning develops independently. At age 9 months, birds looked more at a tool moving a piece of cheese that was not in contact than one that was in direct contact. By the age of 6 months, birds that had not experienced string as a support to hold up objects looked more at impossible images with string hanging from below (unsupported), rather than above (supported). The development of support intuitions may be independent of direct experience with specific support, or knowledge gained from interactions with other objects may be generalised across contexts.

Performance in Object-Choice Aesop's Fable Tasks Are Influenced by Object Biases in New Caledonian Crows but not in Human Children

The ability to reason about causality underlies key aspects of human cognition, but the extent to which non-humans understand causality is still largely unknown. The Aesop's Fable paradigm, where objects are inserted into water-filled tubes to obtain out-of-reach rewards, has been used to test casual reasoning in birds and children. However, success on these tasks may be influenced by other factors, specifically, object preferences present prior to testing or arising during pre-test stone-dropping training. Here, we assessed this 'object-bias' hypothesis by giving New Caledonian crows and 5-10 year old children two object-choice Aesop's Fable experiments: sinking vs. floating objects, and solid vs. hollow objects. Before each test, we assessed subjects' object preferences and/or trained them to prefer the alternative object. Both crows and children showed pre-test object preferences, suggesting that birds in previous Aesop's Fable studies may also have had initial preferences for objects that proved to be functional on test. After training to prefer the non-functional object, crows, but not children, performed more poorly on these two object-choice Aesop's Fable tasks than subjects in previous studies. Crows dropped the non-functional objects into the tube on their first trials, indicating that, unlike many children, they do not appear to have an a priori understanding of water displacement. Alternatively, issues with inhibition could explain their performance. The crows did, however, learn to solve the tasks over time. We tested crows further to determine whether their eventual success was based on learning about the functional properties of the objects, or associating dropping the functional object with reward. Crows inserted significantly more rewarded, non-functional objects than non-rewarded, functional objects. These findings suggest that the ability of New Caledonian crows to produce performances rivaling those of young children on object-choice Aesop's Fable tasks is partly due to pre-existing object preferences.

Affective forecasting in an orangutan: predicting the hedonic outcome of novel juice mixes

Affective forecasting is an ability that allows the prediction of the hedonic outcome of never-before experienced situations, by mentally recombining elements of prior experiences into possible scenarios, and pre-experiencing what these might feel like. It has been hypothesised that this ability is uniquely human. For example, given prior experience with the ingredients, but in the absence of direct experience with the mixture, only humans are said to be able to predict that lemonade tastes better with sugar than without it. Non-human animals, on the other hand, are claimed to be confined to predicting-exclusively and inflexibly-the outcome of previously experienced situations. Relying on gustatory stimuli, we devised a non-verbal method for assessing affective forecasting and tested comparatively one Sumatran orangutan and ten human participants. Administered as binary choices, the test required the participants to mentally construct novel juice blends from familiar ingredients and to make hedonic predictions concerning the ensuing mixes. The orangutan's performance was within the range of that shown by the humans. Both species made consistent choices that reflected independently measured taste preferences for the stimuli. Statistical models fitted to the data confirmed the predictive accuracy of such a relationship. The orangutan, just like humans, thus seems to have been able to make hedonic predictions concerning never-before experienced events.

Hippocampal-like circuitry in the pallium of an electric fish: Possible substrates for recursive pattern separation and completion

Teleost fish are capable of complex behaviors, including social and spatial learning; lesion studies show that these abilities require dorsal telencephalon (pallium). The teleost telencephalon has subpallial and pallial components. The subpallium is well described and highly conserved. In contrast, the teleost pallium is not well understood and its relation to that of other vertebrates remains controversial. Here we analyze the connectivity of the subdivisions of dorsal pallium (DD) of an electric gymnotiform fish, Apteronotus leptorhynchus: superficial (DDs), intermediate (DDi) and magnocellular (DDmg) components. The major pathways are recursive: the dorsolateral pallium (DL) projects strongly to DDi, with lesser inputs to DDs and DDmg. DDi in turn projects strongly to DDmg, which then feeds back diffusely to DL. Our quantitative analysis of DDi connectivity demonstrates that it is a global recurrent network. In addition, we show that the DD subnuclei have complex reciprocal connections with subpallial regions. Specifically, both DDi and DDmg are reciprocally connected to pallial interneurons within the misnamed rostral entopeduncular nucleus (Er). Based on DD connectivity, we illustrate the close similarity, and possible homology, between hippocampal and DD/DL circuitry. We hypothesize that DD/DL circuitry can implement the same pattern separation and completion computations ascribed to the hippocampal dentate gyrus and CA3 fields. We further contend that the DL to DDi to DDmg to DL feedback loop makes the pattern separation/completion operations recursive. We discuss our results with respect to recent studies on fear avoidance conditioning in zebrafish and attention and spatial learning in a pulse gymnotiform fish. J. Comp. Neurol. 525:8-46, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.