Physical cognition and tool-use: performance of Darwin’s finches in the two-trap tube task

Teschke, Irmgard; Tebbich, Sabine

doi:10.1007/s10071-011-0390-9

Cited by 24 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The most widely used paradigm – the trap-tube task – has been employed to investigate whether causal understanding underlies the natural tool-use found in some species of primates [9]–[13] and birds [14], [15]. In this task, an animal uses a stick to push or pull a food reward out of a perspex tube, avoiding a visible hole in the centre of the tube where the food would become trapped.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using the Aesop's Fable Paradigm to Investigate Causal Understanding of Water Displacement by New Caledonian Crows

et al. 2014

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Understanding causal regularities in the world is a key feature of human cognition. However, the extent to which non-human animals are capable of causal understanding is not well understood. Here, we used the Aesop's fable paradigm – in which subjects drop stones into water to raise the water level and obtain an out of reach reward – to assess New Caledonian crows' causal understanding of water displacement. We found that crows preferentially dropped stones into a water-filled tube instead of a sand-filled tube; they dropped sinking objects rather than floating objects; solid objects rather than hollow objects, and they dropped objects into a tube with a high water level rather than a low one. However, they failed two more challenging tasks which required them to attend to the width of the tube, and to counter-intuitive causal cues in a U-shaped apparatus. Our results indicate that New Caledonian crows possess a sophisticated, but incomplete, understanding of the causal properties of displacement, rivalling that of 5–7 year old children.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using the Aesop's Fable Paradigm to Investigate Causal Understanding of Water Displacement by New Caledonian Crows

et al. 2014

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“…Problem-solving tasks, especially those that involve the removal of obstacles blocking access to food, have proved useful for this [22]. It was both Darwin's finch innovativeness in the wild and their strong performance in problem-solving tasks [23][24][25][26][27] that led Tebbich et al [11] to apply the flexible stem hypothesis to this clade. If our innovation data suggest that the stem is at the level of the family and superfamily, we should be able to identify other innovative Thraupidae and New World nine-primaried oscines that also show enhanced problem-solving abilities.…”

Section: A Review Of Innovativeness and Problemsolving In Loxigilla Bmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feeding innovations in a nested phylogeny of Neotropical passerines

Lefebvre¹,

Ducatez²,

Audet³

2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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One contribution of 15 to a theme issue 'Innovation in animals and humans: understanding the origins and development of novel and creative behaviour'. Several studies on cognition, molecular phylogenetics and taxonomic diversity independently suggest that Darwin's finches are part of a larger clade of speciose, flexible birds, the family Thraupidae, a member of the New World nine-primaried oscine superfamily Emberizoidea. Here, we first present a new, previously unpublished, dataset of feeding innovations covering the Neotropical region and compare the stem clades of Darwin's finches to other neotropical clades at the levels of the subfamily, family and superfamily/order. Both in terms of raw frequency as well as rates corrected for research effort and phylogeny, the family Thraupidae and superfamily Emberizoidea show high levels of innovation, supporting the idea that adaptive radiations are favoured when the ancestral stem species were flexible. Second, we discuss examples of innovation and problem-solving in two opportunistic and tame Emberizoid species, the Barbados bullfinch Loxigilla barbadensis and the Carib grackle Quiscalus lugubris fortirostris in Barbados. We review studies on these two species and argue that a comparison of L. barbadensis with its closest, but very shy and conservative local relative, the black-faced grassquit Tiaris bicolor, might provide key insights into the evolutionary divergence of cognition. A nested phylogeny of flexible new world birdsThe superfamily Emberizoidea, also known as New World nine-primaried oscines [1], includes the families Emberizidae, Icteridae, Parulidae and Cardinalidae, as well as Thraupidae, whose most famous members are Darwin's finches. The superfamily accounts for almost 8% of all birds (832 species, [2]) and has evolved a broad range of morphologies and feeding adaptations that have allowed it to radiate throughout the New World, parts of the Old World (buntings) and to colonize outlying islands in the Pacific (Galápagos finches, Cocos finch) and Atlantic oceans (Tristan da Cunha finches, Gough finch) [3]. The diversification rate of the superfamily, based on statistical comparisons [4] and molecular estimates of divergence time from common ancestors [1], is higher than that of other clades, with the families Icteridae (grackles, cowbirds and New World blackbirds) and Thraupidae (collectively referred to as tanagers) contributing most of the effect.The family Thraupidae in particular has a 40% higher diversification rate than its most closely related clades, five times higher than that of the Neoaves mean and an order of magnitude higher than the vertebrate average [1]. Recent revisions of Thraupidae molecular phylogeny [5] have led to the incorporation into this family of many species previously classified [6] as Emberizidae. This includes Darwin's finches, as well as several Caribbean bullfinch and grassquit genera, plus the bananaquit Coereba flaveola that had earlier been considered the sole member of the Coeribidae. This revision makes tanagers th...

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“…Despite the fact that we can be reasonably certain that adult humans' physical cognition consists of an intuitive understanding of constructs such as "gravity" and "transfer of force," and that the causal structure and dimensions of the problem used in Experiment 1 were identical to those used previously to study people's folk physics (e.g., Silva & Silva, 2010), modifying a single stick to an ideal length produced different results from selecting a stick from a set of ten. That this difference, which is related to the "evaluation and choice" phase of the problem rather than the "execution and solving" phase, influenced the length of the sticks that people preferred underscores the necessity of studying physical cognition in relation to a particular causal structure by using a variety of tasks and methods (Girndt, Meier, & Call, 2008;MartinOrdas, Jaeck, & Call, 2012;Seed, Call, Emery, & Clayton, 2009;Tecwyn et al, 2012;Teschke & Tebbich, 2011).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Task-specific modulation of adult humans’ tool preferences: number of choices and size of the problem

2014

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In two experiments, we examined the effect of modifications to the features of a stick-and-tube problem on the stick lengths that adult humans used to solve the problem. In Experiment 1, we examined whether people's tool preferences for retrieving an out-of-reach object in a tube might more closely resemble those reported with laboratory crows if people could modify a single stick to an ideal length to solve the problem. Contrary to when adult humans have selected a tool from a set of ten sticks, asking people to modify a single stick to retrieve an object did not generally result in a stick whose length was related to the object's distance. Consistent with the prior research, though, the working length of the stick was related to the object's distance. In Experiment 2, we examined the effect of increasing the scale of the stick-andtube problem on people's tool preferences. Increasing the scale of the task influenced people to select relatively shorter tools than had selected in previous studies. Although the causal structures of the tasks used in the two experiments were identical, their results were not. This underscores the necessity of studying physical cognition in relation to a particular causal structure by using a variety of tasks and methods.

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Physical cognition and tool-use: performance of Darwin’s finches in the two-trap tube task

Cited by 24 publications

References 22 publications

Using the Aesop's Fable Paradigm to Investigate Causal Understanding of Water Displacement by New Caledonian Crows

Using the Aesop's Fable Paradigm to Investigate Causal Understanding of Water Displacement by New Caledonian Crows

Feeding innovations in a nested phylogeny of Neotropical passerines

Task-specific modulation of adult humans’ tool preferences: number of choices and size of the problem

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