Evidence Of Cognitive Flexibility Research Articles

Cognitive flexibility in urban yellow mongooses, Cynictis penicillata

Cognitive flexibility enables animals to alter their behaviour and respond appropriately to environmental changes. Such flexibility is important in urban settings where environmental changes occur rapidly and continually. We studied whether free-living, urban-dwelling yellow mongooses, Cynictis penicillata, in South Africa, are cognitively flexible in reversal learning and attention task experiments (n = 10). Reversal learning was conducted using two puzzle boxes that were distinct visually and spatially, each containing a preferred or non-preferred food type. Once mongooses learned which box contained the preferred food type, the food types were reversed. The mongooses successfully unlearned their previously learned response in favour of learning a new response, possibly through a win-stay, lose-shift strategy. Attention task experiments were conducted using one puzzle box surrounded by zero, one, two or three objects, introducing various levels of distraction while solving the task. The mongooses were distracted by two and three distractions but were able to solve the task despite the distractions by splitting their attention between the puzzle box task and remaining vigilant. However, those exposed to human residents more often were more vigilant. We provide the first evidence of cognitive flexibility in urban yellow mongooses, which enables them to modify their behaviour to urban environments.

Male and female cichlid fish show cognitive inhibitory control ability

Inhibitory control is a way to infer cognitive flexibility in animals by inhibiting a behavioral propensity to obtain a reward. Here we tested whether there are differences in inhibitory control between females and males of the fish Nile tilapia owing to their distinct reproductive roles. Individuals were tested under a detour-reaching paradigm, consisting of training fish to feed behind an opaque barrier and, thereafter, testing them with a transparent one. Fish is expected to avoid trying to cross through the transparent barrier to achieve food (reward), thus showing inhibitory control by recovering the learned detour with the opaque apparatus. Both males and females learned to detour the transparent barrier with similar scores of correct responses, whereas females reached the food faster. This result is probably associated to their different sex roles in reproduction: females care for the eggs and fry inside their mouth (thus requiring a high inhibitory control not to swallow them), whereas males have to stay inside the territory defending it against intruder males, which also demands some inhibitory ability not to leave the spawning site and take the risk of losing it. Furthermore, this evidence of cognitive flexibility can enable social fish to deal with unpredictable interactions.

Do capuchins (Sapajus apella) know how well they will remember? Analysis of delay length-dependency with memory strategies.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in Journal of Comparative Psychology on May 9 2019 (see record 2019-35064-001). Reports several errors in errors in the article: the descriptions of conditions in the Discussion section were incorrect, the number of decimal places for some statistical values was greater, the participants' names were swapped in Tables 1, 2, 3, and 4, and the labels indicating trial types in Figures 3 and 4 were swapped and so did not correctly match the data. All versions of this article have been corrected.] Flexibly changing information processing based on required cognitive resources allows adaptation in terms of cognitive parsimony. Several species have been shown to use temporal durations between memory acquisition and retrieval as a cue for memory-controlling and to engage selectively in active memorization in situations involving lower cognitive cost. However, few studies have addressed whether signaling delay length at different stages of memory affects memorization differently. In the present study with tufted capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella), we added visual cues signaling upcoming delay length to a delayed matching-to-sample task, so that the monkeys were informed about how long information should be maintained at different points during with-sample or after-sample conditions. We investigated whether the monkeys changed their information processing depending on their expectation of the upcoming delay length and on whether encoding was controllable (4 s vs. 16 s, Experiment 1). The results indicate that two monkeys showed different patterns depending on whether encoding was controllable, whereas the third monkey never changed her strategy. The following experiment using shorter delays showed that one monkey showed a similar pattern across experiments, providing robust evidence for cognitive flexibility in accordance with relative task difficulty (1 s vs. 8 s, Experiment 2). Overall, our results suggest that capuchins adopt two kinds of strategies depending on the experimental context, that is, expending fewer resources on relatively difficult trials and/or maintaining their processing style irrespective of delays. Their strategies aiming at saving cognitive costs may reflect a psychological function to control memory formation either prospectively or retrospectively. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The microstructures of network recall: How social networks are encoded and represented in human memory

A growing number of studies indicate that aspects of psychology and cognition influence network structure, but much remains to be learned about how network information is stored and retrieved from memory. Are networks recalled as dyads, as triads, or more generally as sub-groups? We employ an experimental design coupled with exponential random graph models to address this issue. We find that respondents flexibly encode social information as triads or groups, depending on the network, but not as dyads. This supports prior research showing that networks are stored using “compression heuristics”, but also provides evidence of cognitive flexibility in the process of encoding relational information.