Abstract
Studying animal cognition is meaningful because it helps us understand how animals adapt to the natural environment. Many birds build nests, clean their nests and reject foreign objects from their nests, which provide an optimal opportunity for studying their cognition toward foreign objects in nests. However, hand-made models used in previous studies have many deficiencies that considerably constrain our capacity to understand the evolution of avian cognition of foreign objects because they are unquantifiable and dependent on different features. We established a 3D modelling and printing method to manipulate one geometric dimension of a model while controlling for others, which allowed us to investigate avian cognition for different dimensions independently. Here we introduce this method, conduct an empirical study as an example, and discuss its applications to further studies.
Highlights
Cognition refers to the mental capacities of animals responding to external or internal stimuli, behind which lies a series of physiological and neural activities that are determined by diverse genotypic traits combined with environmental factors [1,2].Animal cognition determines how animals perceive and react to the natural environment, which further influences the fitness of animals [3,4,5]
2.2. 3D modelling of stereoscopic structure. We generated another geometric dimension in models, the stereoscopic structure, which refers to the volume degree of objects in space
We predicted that the cognitive capacity of birds should increase after we manipulated the geometric dimension from egg-shaped to non-egg-shaped properties
Summary
Cognition refers to the mental capacities of animals responding to external or internal stimuli, behind which lies a series of physiological and neural activities that are determined by diverse genotypic traits combined with environmental factors [1,2]. The changes in surface edges of models allow us to independently test the capacity and degree of edge detection in avian cognition We generated another geometric dimension in models, the stereoscopic structure, which refers to the volume degree of objects in space. We predicted that the cognitive capacity of birds should increase after we manipulated the geometric dimension (i.e. the surface edge or stereoscopic structure of objects) from egg-shaped to non-egg-shaped properties. To change the stereoscopic structure of a model while controlling for surface edges, we used the function of scale transformation in 3D Studio Max 2015 for Windows to compress one axis of the elliptical models while the other two axes and the number of flats on the surface was unaltered (figure 1). The changes in stereoscopic structure of a model allow us to test the capacity and degree of stereoscopic detection in avian cognition independently
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