What happened? Do preschool children and capuchin monkeys spontaneously use visual traces to locate a reward?

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement no. 639072). Edinburgh Zoo's Living Links Research Facility is core supported by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (registered charity no.: SC004064) through funding generated by its visitors, members and supporters.The ability to infer unseen causes from evidence is argued to emerge early in development and to be uniquely human. We explored whether preschoolers and capuchin monkeys could locate a reward based on the physical traces left following a hidden event. Preschoolers and capuchin monkeys were presented with two cups covered with foil. Behind a barrier, an experimenter (E) punctured the foil coverings one at a time, revealing the cups with one cover broken after the first event and both covers broken after the second. One event involved hiding a reward, the other event was performed with a stick (order counterbalanced). Preschoolers and, with additional experience, monkeys could connect the traces to the objects used in the puncturing events to find the reward. Reversing the order of events perturbed the performance of 3-year olds and capuchins, while 4-year-old children performed above chance when the order of events was reversed from the first trial. Capuchins performed significantly better on the ripped foil task than they did on an arbitrary test in which the covers were not ripped but rather replaced with a differently patterned cover. We conclude that by 4 years of age children spontaneously reason backwards from evidence to deduce its cause.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Inhibitory control and cue relevance modulate chimpanzees’ (Pan troglodytes) performance in a spatial foraging task

This project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement 639072). Brandon Tinklenberg was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC 435-2016-1051).Inhibition tasks usually require subjects to exert control to act correctly when a competing action plan is prepotent. In comparative psychology, one concern about the existing inhibition tasks is that the relative contribution of inhibitory control to performance (as compared to learning or object knowledge) is rarely explicitly investigated. We addressed this problem by presenting chimpanzees with a spatial foraging task in which they could acquire food more efficiently by learning which objects were baited. In Experiment 1, we examined how objects that elicited a prepotent approach response, transparent cups containing food, affected their learning rates. Although showing an initial bias to approach these sealed cups with visible food, the chimpanzees learned to avoid them more quickly across sessions compared to a color discrimination. They also learned a color discrimination more quickly if the incorrect cups were sealed such that a piece of food could never be hidden inside them. In Experiment 2, visible food of 2 different types was sealed in the upper part of the cups: 1 type signaled the presence of food reward hidden underneath; the cups with the other type were sealed. The chimpanzees learned more quickly in a congruent condition (the to-be-chosen food cue matched the reward) than in an incongruent condition (the to-be-avoided food cue matched the reward). Together, these findings highlight that performance in inhibition tasks is affected by several other cognitive abilities such as object knowledge, memory, and learning, which need to be quantified before meaningful comparisons can be drawn.PostprintPeer reviewe

How can I find what I want? Can children, chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys form abstract representations to guide their behavior in a sampling task?

Authors are grateful to the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) and the University of St Andrews for core financial support to the RZSS Edinburgh Zoo’s Living Links Research Centre, where this project was carried out. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. [639072]). We acknowledge the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) [funding reference number 2016-05552].Abstract concepts are a powerful tool for making wide-ranging predictions in new situations based on little experience. Whereas looking-time studies suggest an early emergence of this ability in human infancy, other paradigms like the relational match to sample task often fail to detect abstract concepts until late preschool years. Similarly, non-human animals show difficulties and often succeed only after long training regimes. Given the considerable influence of slight task modifications, the conclusiveness of these findings for the development and phylogenetic distribution of abstract reasoning is debated. Here, we tested the abilities of 3 to 5-year-old children, chimpanzees, and capuchin monkeys in a unified and more ecologically valid task design based on the concept of “overhypotheses” (Goodman, 1955). Participants sampled high- and low-valued items from containers that either each offered items of uniform value or a mix of high- and low-valued items. In a test situation, participants should switch away earlier from a container offering low-valued items when they learned that, in general, items within a container are of the same type, but should stay longer if they formed the overhypothesis that containers bear a mix of types. We compared each species' performance to the predictions of a probabilistic hierarchical Bayesian model forming overhypotheses at a first and second level of abstraction, adapted to each species' reward preferences. Children and, to a more limited extent, chimpanzees demonstrated their sensitivity to abstract patterns in the evidence. In contrast, capuchin monkeys did not exhibit conclusive evidence for the ability of abstract knowledge formation.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

A novel form of spontaneous tool use displayed by several captive greater vasa parrots (Coracopsis vasa)

Parrots are frequently cited for their sophisticated problem-solving abilities, but cases of habitual tool use among psittacines are scarce. We report the first evidence, to our knowledge, of tool use by greater vasa parrots (Coracopsis vasa). Several members of a captive population spontaneously adopted a novel tool-using technique by using pebbles and date pits either (i) to scrape on the inner surface of seashells, subsequently licking the resulting calcium powder from the tool, or (ii) as a wedge to break off smaller pieces of the shell for ingestion. Tool use occurred most frequently just prior to the breeding season, during which time numerous instances of tool transfer were also documented. These observations provide new insights into the tool-using capabilities of parrots and highlight the greater vasa parrot as a species of interest for studies of physical cognition

I TO JE MATEMATIKA - DOMAĆA ZADAĆA U TROGODIŠNJOJ STRUKOVNOJ ŠKOLI

KLD was funded by a Bobby Jones scholarship and by the University of St Andrews.Imagining the future is a powerful tool for making plans and solving problems. It is thought to rely on the episodic system which also underpins remembering a specific past event [1, 2, 3]. However, the emergence of episodic future thinking over development and evolution is debated [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. One key source of positive evidence in pre-schoolers and animals is the “spoon test” or item choice test [4, 10], in which participants encounter a problem in one context and then a choice of items in another context, one of which is the solution to the problem. A majority of studies report that most children choose the right item by age 4 [10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, cf. 16]. Apes and corvids have also been shown to pass versions of the test [17, 18, 19]. However, it has been suggested that a simpler mechanism could be driving choice: the participant simply chooses the item that has been assigned salience or value, without necessarily imagining the future event [16, 20, 21, 22, 23]. We developed a new test in which two of the items offered to children were associated with positive outcomes, but only one was still useful. We found that older children (5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds) chose the correct item at above chance levels, but younger children (3- and 4-year-olds) did not. In further tests, 4-year-olds showed an intact memory for the encoding event. We conclude that positive association substantially impacts performance on item choice tests in 4-year-olds and that future planning may have a more protracted developmental trajectory than episodic memory.PostprintPeer reviewe

Function and flexibility of object exploration in kea and New Caledonian crows

Data collection with the New Caledonian crows was funded by an International Seedcorn Award from the University of York to M.L.L. This study was supported by a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship (A.H.T.). Our data are deposited at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dq04j [48].A range of non-human animals frequently manipulate and explore objects in their environment, which may enable them to learn about physical properties and potentially form more abstract concepts of properties such as weight and rigidity. Whether animals can apply the information learned during their exploration to solve novel problems, however, and whether they actually change their exploratory behavior to seek functional information about objects have not been fully explored. We allowed kea (Nestor notabilis) and New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) to explore sets of novel objects both before and after encountering a task in which some of the objects could function as tools. Following this, subjects were given test trials in which they could choose among the objects they had explored to solve a tool-use task. Several individuals from both species performed above chance on these test trials, and only did so after exploring the objects, compared with a control experiment with no prior exploration phase. These results suggest that selection of functional tools may be guided by information acquired during exploration. Neither kea nor crows changed the duration or quality of their exploration after learning that the objects had a functional relevance, suggesting that birds do not adjust their behavior to explicitly seek this information.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Chimpanzees flexibly update working memory contents and show susceptibility to distraction in the self-ordered search task

This project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 639072).Working memory (WM) is a core executive function that allows individuals to hold, process, and manipulate information. WM capacity has been repeatedly nominated as a key factor in human cognitive evolution; nevertheless, little is known about the WM abilities of our closest primate relatives. In this study, we examined signatures of WM ability in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Standard WM tasks for humans (Homo sapiens) often require participants to continuously update their WM. In Experiment 1, we implemented this updating requirement in a foraging situation:zoo-housed chimpanzees (N=13) searched for food in an array of containers. To avoid redundant searches, they needed to continuously update which containers they had already visited (similar to WM paradigms for human children) with 15-sretention intervals in between each choice. We examined chimpanzees’ WM capacity and to what extent they used spatial cues and object features to memorize their previous choices. In Experiment 2, we investigated how susceptible their WM was to attentional interference, an important signature, setting WM in humans apart from long-term memory. We found large individual differences with some individuals remembering at least their last four choices. Chimpanzees used a combination of spatial cues and object features to remember which boxes they had chosen already. Moreover, their performance decreased specifically when competing memory information was introduced. Finally, we found that individual differences in task performance were highly reliable over time. Together, these findings show remarkable similarities between human and chimpanzee WM abilities despite evolutionary and life history differences.PostprintPostprintPeer reviewe

The veteran-centered care conferences: interprofessional education and community involvement facilitated by the health sciences librarian

Background: Veterans have a variety of unique healthcare needs and receive care from both the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and private healthcare systems. Because healthcare students will likely treat veterans at some time during their career, it is important they gain exposure to working with veterans during their professional degree programs. Case Presentation: This case report presents the development of an annual Veteran-Centered Care Conference (VCCC) at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. The VCCC included a faculty librarian who led a multi-disciplinary team that planned and coordinated each event. Speakers and participants included university students and faculty from multiple healthcare disciplines, as well as representatives from the VA, veterans’ advocacy groups, and community members (including many veterans). The purpose of the VCCC was to raise awareness of the healthcare needs of contemporary veterans. The goal of the VCCC was to improve healthcare provided to veterans by enhancing civilian health professions students’ knowledge of the potential effects of military service on a person’s health. Conclusion: After four successful events covering such topics as PTSD, specific health concerns of women veterans, substance use disorder, and homelessness, the VCCC was canceled, primarily due to low pre-registration. Examples of lessons learned and future possibilities for the VCCC and the patient-centered care conference format are discussed. This report is of particular importance given the many years the United States has been at war in the Middle East and the recent withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan

The structure of executive functions in preschool children and chimpanzees

Executive functions (EF) are a core aspect of cognition. Research with adult humans has produced evidence for unity and diversity in the structure of EF. Studies with preschoolers favour a 1-factor model, in which variation in EF tasks is best explained by a single underlying trait on which all EF tasks load. How EF are structured in nonhuman primates remains unknown. This study starts to fill this gap through a comparative, multi-trait multi-method test battery with preschoolers (N = 185) and chimpanzees (N = 55). The battery aimed at measuring working memory updating, inhibition, and attention shifting with three non-verbal tasks per function. For both species the correlations between tasks were low to moderate and not confined to tasks within the same putative function. Factor analyses produced some evidence for the unity of executive functions in both groups, in that our analyses revealed shared variance. However, we could not conclusively distinguish between 1-, 2- or 3-factor models. We discuss the implications of our findings with respect to the ecological validity of current psychometric research

The Evolution of Primate Short-Term Memory.

Short-term memory is implicated in a range of cognitive abilities and is critical for understanding primate cognitive evolution. To investigate the effects of phylogeny, ecology and sociality on short-term memory, we tested the largest and most diverse primate sample to date (421 non-human primates across 41 species) in an experimental delayed-response task. Our results confirm previous findings that longer delays decrease memory performance across species and taxa. Our analyses demonstrate a considerable contribution of phylogeny over ecological and social factors on the distribution of short-term memory performance in primates; closely related species had more similar short-term memory abilities. Overall, individuals in the branch of Hominoidea performed better compared to Cercopithecoidea, who in turn performed above Platyrrhini and Strepsirrhini. Interdependencies between phylogeny and socioecology of a given species presented an obstacle to disentangling the effects of each of these factors on the evolution of short-term memory capacity. However, this study offers an important step forward in understanding the interspecies and individual variation in short-term memory ability by providing the first phylogenetic reconstruction of this trait’s evolutionary history. The dataset constitutes a unique resource for studying the evolution of primate cognition and the role of short-term memory in other cognitive abilities.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio