Abstract
To investigate cognitive operations underlying sequential problem solving, we confronted ten Goffin’s cockatoos with a baited box locked by five different inter-locking devices. Subjects were either naïve or had watched a conspecific demonstration, and either faced all devices at once or incrementally. One naïve subject solved the problem without demonstration and with all locks present within the first five sessions (each consisting of one trial of up to 20 minutes), while five others did so after social demonstrations or incremental experience. Performance was aided by species-specific traits including neophilia, a haptic modality and persistence. Most birds showed a ratchet-like progress, rarely failing to solve a stage once they had done it once. In most transfer tests subjects reacted flexibly and sensitively to alterations of the locks’ sequencing and functionality, as expected from the presence of predictive inferences about mechanical interactions between the locks.
Highlights
Mapping the cognitive operations by which different species solve complex problems is a central challenge to comparative cognition
When all locks were present the animals correctly touched first the pin in 37.5% of the trials, against a random expectation of 20%, but this does not reach conventional statistical two-tailed significance
The initial acquisition of the multiple lock problem was remarkable in that the cockatoos progressed by a combination of intense exploration and manipulation: the cockatoos interacted extensively with the apparatus before discovering partial or whole solutions, exhibiting diverse haptic exploratory behaviors
Summary
Mapping the cognitive operations by which different species solve complex problems is a central challenge to comparative cognition. Because independently acquired actions may produce outcomes that constitute stimuli capable of triggering other actions, innovative concatenations of behaviour can emerge This was exemplified by Epstein et al.’s [2] demonstration that pigeons pre-trained in individual tasks generate novel, functional sequences of up to four steps that look insightful. If a multiple step problem is presented without such pre-experience, downstream actions do not initially have reinforcement value and cannot acquire it because access to the goal requires earlier steps This difficulty could be attenuated by goal representation, if the chance discovery of chain-shortening actions at the distal end are already reinforcing even if they do not directly result in reaching the goal (e.g. if moving closer to reaching the goal by effecting a distal step is reinforcing because it is perceived as progress)
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