Avian Models for Human Cognitive Neuroscience: A Proposal

Clayton, Nicola S.; Emery, Nathan J.

doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2015.04.024

Cited by 120 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 90 publications

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“…This structure has the same developmental origin in birds and mammals (65), which had their most recent common ancestor in the Late Carboniferous not long after fully terrestrial animals arose. With this affordance of long-range vision, therefore, we hypothesize that the core neuronal components of planning (53, 65)-now understood to occur in both birds (66) and mammals but less well-studied in reptiles (67)-evolved within a common ancestor (65).…”

Section: Implications Of Long-range Vision For Reactive Neural Circuimentioning

confidence: 99%

Massive increase in visual range preceded the origin of terrestrial vertebrates

MacIver

Schmitz

Mugan

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The evolution of terrestrial vertebrates, starting around 385 million years ago, is an iconic moment in evolution that brings to mind images of fish transforming into four-legged animals. Here, we show that this radical change in body shape was preceded by an equally dramatic change in sensory abilities akin to transitioning from seeing over short distances in a dense fog to seeing over long distances on a clear day. Measurements of eye sockets and simulations of their evolution show that eyes nearly tripled in size just before vertebrates began living on land. Computational simulations of these animal's visual ecology show that for viewing objects through water, the increase in eye size provided a negligible increase in performance. However, when viewing objects through air, the increase in eye size provided a large increase in performance. The jump in eye size was, therefore, unlikely to have arisen for seeing through water and instead points to an unexpected hybrid of seeing through air while still primarily inhabiting water. Our results and several anatomical innovations arising at the same time suggest lifestyle similarity to crocodiles. The consequent combination of the increase in eye size and vision through air would have conferred a 1 million-fold increase in the amount of space within which objects could be seen. The "buena vista" hypothesis that our data suggest is that seeing opportunities from afar played a role in the subsequent evolution of fully terrestrial limbs as well as the emergence of elaborated action sequences through planning circuits in the nervous system. fish-tetrapod transition | vision | visual ecology | terrestriality | prospective cognition B efore terrestrial vertebrates arose, their ancestors inhabited underwater environments, where vision is highly compromised compared with vision above water. The visual difference between life in water and life above it is comparable with driving fast on a foggy road, where our responses must be rapid and simple, vs. driving in clear daylight conditions, where deliberation over more complex choices is enabled by the vast increase in sensory range. Nonetheless, although an immense quantity of work has been done on the emergence of limbs during the evolution of land vertebrates, how visual capability changed during the transition from water to land has not been explored. In part, this lack of exploration is because computational visual ecology-necessary to interpret the fossil data-has not been combined with early tetrapod paleontology. Through combining these disciplines, here we probe the evolutionary history of the switch in our visual sensory ecology from water to air. Surprisingly, our results show that eyes tripled in size just before full-time life on land evolved. Convergent lines of evidence, including our own, strongly support the hypothesis that a crocodilian ecotype-using the greatly enhanced visual capabilities conferred by vision through air to prey on the bounty of unexploited invertebrates that long preceded the vertebrates onto ...

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Section: Implications Of Long-range Vision For Reactive Neural Circuimentioning

confidence: 99%

Massive increase in visual range preceded the origin of terrestrial vertebrates

MacIver

Schmitz

Mugan

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…In a now classic paper, Clayton and Dickinson (1998) described the first evidence of episodic memory in a nonhuman using scrub jays (for reviews, see Clayton, Bussey, Emery, & Dickinson, 2003;Clayton & Emery, 2015;Clayton, Salwiczek, & Dickinson, 2007;Griffiths, Dickinson, & Clayton, 1999); the phenomenon of episodic memory likely predates the more recent application of behavioral definitions of episodic memory. Food-storing scrub jays cached either peanuts followed by wax worms or, on other occasions, worms followed by peanuts; they retrieved the caches after a short or long retention interval.…”

Section: What-where-when Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Animal models of episodic memory

Crystal¹

2018

CCBR

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People retrieve episodic memories about specific earlier events that happened to them. Accordingly, researchers have sought to evaluate the hypothesis that nonhumans retrieve episodic memories. The central hypothesis of an animal model of episodic memory is that, at the moment of a memory assessment, the animal retrieves a memory of the specific earlier event. Testing this hypothesis requires the elimination of nonepisodic memory hypotheses. A number of case studies focus on the development of animal models of episodic memory, including what-where-when memory, source memory, item-in-context memory, and unexpected questions. Compelling evidence for episodic memory comes from studies in which judgments of familiarity cannot produce accurate choices in memory assessments. These approaches may be used to explore the evolution of cognition. Keywords: episodic memory, what-where-when memory, source memory, binding, item-in-context memory IntroductionFundamental aspects of human cognition raise a natural question, namely, How widely distributed are elements of cognition among nonhuman animals? Exploring the distribution of cognitive processes in animals may provide insight into the evolution of cognition (Emery & Clayton, 2004;Gallistel, 1990). This review focuses on episodic memory (see Table 1). Students of human memory focus on episodic memory because it stores personal past experiences of an individual. In this respect, episodic memory is self-referencing. By contrast, other memory systems store facts without retaining other features that accompany memory storage. Moreover, students of human memory have been concerned with subjective experiences that are thought to accompany episodic memory retrieval in people (Tulving, 1985(Tulving, , 1987. However, documenting behavioral expression of a putative subjective experience is problematic in animals. This review advocates that it is profitable to focus on the content of episodic memories, rather than the subjective experiences that may accompany episodic memory. The central hypothesis of an animal model of episodic memory is that, at the moment of a memory assessment, the animal remembers back in time and retrieves a memory of the earlier event or episode (Crystal, 2013b(Crystal, , 2016a(Crystal, , 2016b). An important alternative explanation exists whenever the animal can solve the memory test without remembering back to the specific earlier event. In this review, I focus on judgments of familiarity as a primary nonepisodic memory alternative. According to this view, the presentation of a stimulus gives rise to a memory trace that passively decays as a function of time. Because the age of memories can be detected from a comparison of memory trace strengths, an animal may solve a new-old memory test by following a relatively simple rule such as, Choose the item that currently generates the lowest level of familiarity. Critically, an animal that uses judgments of relative familiarity need not retrieve an episodic memory of the earlier event (see details that follow). Oth...

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“…Birds can also be trained in the laboratory to distinguish stimuli based on the number of items [8,22,23]. Corvid songbirds are renowned for their flexible behaviour [24], making them ideal model organisms for the study of cognition [25,26] and high-level brain functions [27][28][29][30]. Ever since Koehler and his co-workers explored the numerical capabilities of birds [31], corvids have been known to show some level of quantity discrimination [32], and they use quantity rules to direct behaviour [33].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Numerosity representations in crows obey the Weber–Fechner law

Ditz¹,

Nieder²

2016

Proc. R. Soc. B.

104

105

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The ability to estimate number is widespread throughout the animal kingdom. Based on the relative close phylogenetic relationship (and thus equivalent brain structures), non-verbal numerical representations in human and nonhuman primates show almost identical behavioural signatures that obey the Weber-Fechner law. However, whether numerosity discriminations of vertebrates with a very different endbrain organization show the same behavioural signatures remains unknown. Therefore, we tested the numerical discrimination performance of two carrion crows (Corvus corone) to a broad range of numerosities from 1 to 30 in a delayed match-to-sample task similar to the one used previously with primates. The crows' discrimination was based on an analogue number system and showed the Weber-fraction signature (i.e. the 'just noticeable difference' between numerosity pairs increased in proportion to the numerical magnitudes). The detailed analysis of the performance indicates that numerosity representations in crows are scaled on a logarithmically compressed 'number line'. Because the same psychophysical characteristics are found in primates, these findings suggest fundamentally similar number representations between primates and birds. This study helps to resolve a classical debate in psychophysics: the mental number line seems to be logarithmic rather than linear, and not just in primates, but across vertebrates.

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Avian Models for Human Cognitive Neuroscience: A Proposal

Cited by 120 publications

References 90 publications

Massive increase in visual range preceded the origin of terrestrial vertebrates

Massive increase in visual range preceded the origin of terrestrial vertebrates

Animal models of episodic memory

Numerosity representations in crows obey the Weber–Fechner law

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