Animal Cognition Research Research Articles

Editorial: The Value and Status of Replications in Animal Behavior and Cognition Research

Editorial: The Value and Status of Replications in Animal Behavior and Cognition Research

What smells? Gauging attention to olfaction in canine cognition research.

One of the challenges of animal cognition research is overcoming anthropocentric sensory biases-in particular, favoring visual information and cues despite the dominance of other sensory cues in many nonhuman research subjects. As such, it is particularly important for animal cognition researchers to explicitly mention steps taken to control for and attend to the sensory world of their study species. Dogs are well known for their reliance on olfaction, but the extent to which dog cognition and behavior research accounts for olfactory cues or incorporates olfactory controls is unknown. With this bibliographic study, we reviewed canine research published in the past 10years (2008-2018) in 13 scientific journals and coded the 481 resulting papers for mentions of olfactory or odor cues or controls. Our findings indicate that despite widespread acceptance of the significance of olfaction to dogs, scientific methodology rarely takes olfactory information processing into account. Finally, we propose a simple rubric of recommended reporting of olfactory information in research contexts, with the aims to help attune researchers to the umwelt of their study subjects, and to enhance the methodological reproducibility of canine cognition research.

How smart is artificial intelligence? Are today's best artificial-intelligence systems as smart as a mouse? A crow? A chimp? A new contest aims to find out - [Spectral Lines

The Animal-AI Olympics, which will begin this June, aims to benchmark the current level of various AIs against different animal species using a range of established animal cognition tasks. At stake are bragging rights and US $10,000 in prizes. The project, a partnership between the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and GoodAI, a research institution based in Prague, is a new way to evaluate the progress of AI systems toward what researchers call artificial general intelligence.¶ Such an assessment is necessary, the organizers say, because recent benchmarks are somewhat deceiving. While AI systems have bested human grandmasters in a host of challenging competitions, including the board game Go and the video game StarCraft, these matchups only proved that the AIs were astoundingly good at those particular games. AI systems have yet to demonstrate the kind of flexible intelligence that enables humans to reason, plan, and act in many different domains. If you asked the StarCraft-playing AI to devise an investment strategy for your retirement, for example, it would give you the digital equivalent of a blank stare.¶ Animals may not be planning for retirement, they can generalize, transfer lessons learned to new circumstances, and engage in creative problem solving—as anyone who has ever watched a squirrel stage an attack on a bird feeder can testify. Matthew Crosby, one of the contest's organizers and a postdoctoral researcher at the Leverhulme Center and at Imperial College London, says he's eager to see if any of the AI agents entered in the contest can display similar abilities when confronted with tests typically used in animal cognition research. An AI can be great at one task, Crosby says, but can it solve similar tasks that it hasn't seen before?

Farm Animal Cognition-Linking Behavior, Welfare and Ethics.

Farm animal welfare is a major concern for society and food production. To more accurately evaluate animal farming in general and to avoid exposing farm animals to poor welfare situations, it is necessary to understand not only their behavioral but also their cognitive needs and capacities. Thus, general knowledge of how farm animals perceive and interact with their environment is of major importance for a range of stakeholders, from citizens to politicians to cognitive ethologists to philosophers. This review aims to outline the current state of farm animal cognition research and focuses on ungulate livestock species, such as cattle, horses, pigs and small ruminants, and reflects upon a defined set of cognitive capacities (physical cognition: categorization, numerical ability, object permanence, reasoning, tool use; social cognition: individual discrimination and recognition, communication with humans, social learning, attribution of attention, prosociality, fairness). We identify a lack of information on certain aspects of physico-cognitive capacities in most farm animal species, such as numerosity discrimination and object permanence. This leads to further questions on how livestock comprehend their physical environment and understand causal relationships. Increasing our knowledge in this area will facilitate efforts to adjust husbandry systems and enrichment items to meet the needs and preferences of farm animals. Research in the socio-cognitive domain indicates that ungulate livestock possess sophisticated mental capacities, such as the discrimination between, and recognition of, conspecifics as well as human handlers using multiple modalities. Livestock also react to very subtle behavioral cues of conspecifics and humans. These socio-cognitive capacities can impact human-animal interactions during management practices and introduce ethical considerations on how to treat livestock in general. We emphasize the importance of gaining a better understanding of how livestock species interact with their physical and social environments, as this information can improve housing and management conditions and can be used to evaluate the use and treatment of animals during production.

Azure-winged magpies solve string-pulling tasks by partial understanding of the physical cognition

String-pulling is one of the most widely used paradigms in animal cognition research. We investigated how azure-winged magpies Cyanopica cyanus solve multiple-string problems that they have never encountered before. In Experiment 1, the strings were arranged in parallel, slanted, or crossed to investigate what rules azure-winged magpies use to solve multiple spatial relations of strings. Experiment 2 assessed whether the subjects understood the connection between the string and the bait while taking advantage of broken strings. In Experiment 3, the subjects were confronted with strings of different lengths attached to rewards in order to explore whether the string length, as a proxy for the pulling efficiency or reward distance, was crucial for the birds’ choice of which string to pull. Generally, the birds were successful in tasks where the reward was close to the correct string’s end, and they relied on a “proximity rule” in most cases. The results showed that azure-winged magpies had a partial understanding of the physical principles underlying the string-pulling but were stumped by complex spatial relations. They likely relied on simple strategies such as the proximity rule to solve the tasks. The effects of individual difference and experiential learning on string-pulling performance are also discussed.

Trends in behavioural ecology: Putting South African research in a global perspective

South Africa remains at the leading edge of scientific publishing on the African continent, yet few analyses of publication patterns exist outside the biomedical field. Considering the large number of protected areas and mammalian guilds within the country, I examined trends in South African ecological research as it pertains to the behaviour of mammals. I assessed the topics and taxonomic focus of mammalogists at South African institutes over the span of 15 years (2001–2015), and contrasted local research with the shifting focus of international behavioural research. This review of more than 1000 publications indicates that South African based researchers exhibit a strong tendency towards field-based research, as opposed to laboratory-centred experiments. In terms of topical focus, local ecologists place significant weight on the behavioural categories of mating, social and foraging behaviour – reflecting a global priority for these topics. This finding contrasts with an increased emphasis on animal cognition and communication research in the international research arena, including field-based studies on these themes. I make suggestions on how behavioural ecologists in South Africa can align themselves with global trends while also continuing to distinguish those facets that make South African behavioural ecology unique.
 Significance: 
 
 This review is the first of behavioural ecology in South Africa.
 Suggestions are made for where South African researchers can profitably shift research focus.
 International trends in behavioural ecology are highlighted.

Animal cognition research offers outreach opportunity

In a classroom in Thailand, groups of elementary school children are marching around large sheets of newspaper on the floor. Music plays. Each group of five kids has a newspaper sheet. When the music stops, the children rush to stand on their sheet. The first time, there’s room for all. As music starts and stops, though, the teacher makes the newspaper sheet smaller and smaller. Eventually, five pairs of feet can no longer fit on the sheet. Some of the children climb on their partners, cramming their bodies together before tumbling to the ground laughing. Elephants can cooperate with one another by pulling simultaneously on both ends of the rope to gather food from a platform. Joshua Plotnik has sought to incorporate such results into education and conservation efforts. Image courtesy of Joshua Plotnik. The children are having a great time. But this game of “losing space” also has a serious message. With human populations growing and wildlife habitat shrinking, there’s less room for people and animals. In Thailand, that’s led to increasing conflicts between crop-raiding elephants and farmers. These clashes go beyond the research realm, involving a complex interplay of conservation, economics, and societal concerns. So the scientist behind the exercise, Hunter College psychologist and elephant researcher Joshua Plotnik, figured he needed to branch out beyond his fieldwork on elephant cognition and find ways to use his research to help reduce those conflicts. “The fight to protect elephants and other endangered species needed a new focus—classrooms,” he says. Plotnik has taken the unusual steps of setting up his own conservation and education nonprofit, Think Elephants International, and working with schools in the United States and Thailand. One project resulted in his coauthoring a journal article with middle school kids (1). “It is imperative as scientists that we use our …

Cognitive test batteries in animal cognition research: evaluating the past, present and future of comparative psychometrics.

For the past two decades, behavioural ecologists have documented consistent individual differences in behavioural traits within species and found evidence for animal "personality". It is only relatively recently, however, that increasing numbers of researchers have begun to investigate individual differences in cognitive ability within species. It has been suggested that cognitive test batteries may provide an ideal tool for this growing research endeavour. In fact, cognitive test batteries have now been used to examine the causes, consequences and underlying structure of cognitive performance within and between many species. In this review, we document the existing attempts to develop cognitive test batteries for non-human animals and review the claims that these studies have made in terms of the structure and evolution of cognition. We argue that our current test battery methods could be improved on multiple fronts, from the design of tasks, to the domains targeted and the species tested. Refining and optimising test battery design will provide many benefits. In future, we envisage that well-designed cognitive test batteries may provide answers to a range of exciting questions, including giving us greater insight into the evolution and structure of cognition.

Time Does Not Help Orangutans Pongo abelii Solve Physical Problems.

Many questions in animal intelligence and cognition research are challenging. One challenge is to identify mechanisms underlying reasoning in experiments. Here, we provide a way to design such tests in non-human animals. We know from research in skill acquisition in humans that reasoning and thinking can take time because some problems are processed in multiple steps before a solution is reached (e.g., during mental arithmetics). If animals are able to learn through similar processes their decision making can be time consuming, and most importantly improve if more time to process information is allowed. We tested if performance of two Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) increased in a two-choice experiment when they were allowed extra time before making their decisions, compared to when they were forced to decide immediately. We found that the performance of the orangutans did not depend on the time they were allowed to process the information before making their decisions. This methodology provides a potential avenue for empirical tests of mechanisms underlying reasoning in non-human animals.

Western scrub-jays (Aphelocoma californica) solve multiple-string problems by the spatial relation of string and reward.

String-pulling is a widely used paradigm in animal cognition research to assess what animals understand about the functionality of strings as a means to obtain an out-of-reach reward. This study aimed to systematically investigate what rules Western scrub-jays (Aphelocoma californica) use to solve different patterned string tasks, i.e. tasks in which subjects have to choose between two or more strings of which only one is connected to the reward, or where one is more efficient. Arranging strings in a parallel configuration showed that the jays were generally capable of solving multiple-string tasks and acted in a goal-directed manner. The slanted and crossed configurations revealed a reliance on a “proximity rule”, that is, a tendency to choose the string-end closest to the reward. When confronted with strings of different lengths attached to rewards at different distances the birds chose according to the reward distance, preferring the reward closest to them, and were sensitive to the movement of the reward, but did not consistently prefer the shorter and therefore more efficient string. Generally, the scrub-jays were successful in tasks where the reward was closest to the string-ends they needed to pull or when string length and reward distance correlated, but the birds had problems when the wrong string-end was closest to the reward or when the food items were in close proximity to each other. These results show that scrub-jays had a partial understanding of the physical principles underlying string-pulling but relied on simpler strategies such as the proximity rule to solve the tasks.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10071-016-1018-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Commentary: Interpretations without justification: a general argument against Morgan's Canon.

Commentary: Interpretations without justification: a general argument against Morgan's Canon.

Making Clear the Value of Basic Behavioral Research. Commentary: A Crisis in Comparative Psychology: Where Have All the Undergraduates Gone?

We agree with Abramson (2015) that the field of comparative psychology faces a problem with respect to student recruitment. We would argue, however, that the problem is much broader and encompasses all domains of basic behavioral research, of which comparative psychology is just one. Why is this? Abramson (2015) suggests two primary drivers are the lack of undergraduate courses and the lack of graduate programs on comparative psychology. We would add to this a lack of funding. In fact, based on the current funding climate, it is possible that the few undergraduate and graduate programs that exist will disappear. Why is the funding drying up? One need look not too long ago to the furore created by Congress who challenged the validity of the National Institute of Health's (NIH) peer-review process by singling out a peer-reviewed grant by Professor Edward Wasserman on pigeon's categorization abilities. According to a press release by the office of Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas), who introduced an amendment that would effectively by-pass NIH's peer-review process, “NIH has continually failed to give a high priority to research on serious mental illnesses.” That may have been true, but obviously Neugebauer felt he would get more traction for his cause by singling out behavioral work done with pigeons for ridicule. And that strategy is borne out of a failure on our part to explain why basic behavioral research is so important. As Abramson (2015) notes, to improve recruitment, we must make the connection between comparative psychology and human behavior clear. We would add that we must make it clear to students and funding agencies that basic behavioral research lies at the core of every study that seeks to understand human behavior, whether comparative in nature or not. Indeed, behavioral researchers are responsible for the majority of paradigms neuroscientists utilize to study the neural mechanisms of learning and memory. Further, a foundation in behavioral research places students in a strong position to tackle any number of topics in the future. Both authors of this commentary received their PhD training in basic behavioral (animal cognition) research. We both continue to conduct animal cognition studies, but one of us (MC) has embarked on a neuroscience career while the other (DS) has gone on to tackle topics from moral nativism (Scarf et al., 2012a,b) to alcohol consumption in university students (Riordan et al., 2015a,b). Don't get us wrong. We don't believe that basic behavioral research should exist to merely serve neuroscience, or that students should simply use their behavioral training as a springboard into other domains. Most (hopefully all) of us that conduct basic behavioral research do so because we find understanding human and nonhuman animal behavior fascinating. But as Neugebauer's comments foretell, the argument that understanding animal behavior is fascinating in its own right is becoming a harder and harder point to sell. The nuanced and elegant study conducted by Frank and Wasserman (2005) that finally revealed the equivalence relation of symmetry in nonhuman animals by using a successive go/no-go procedure to control for both spatial and temporal response topographies is nothing short of brilliant, but it will go unappreciated by most outside the field of basic behavioral research. Yet because of this study we are now one step closer to understanding the neural basis of equivalence relations, which underlie many of our complex behaviors (Sidman, 1994). In conclusion, it is very obvious to us why we need basic behavioral research. But we need to do a far better job of explaining to those outside our field and funding agencies why basic behavioral research is essential. Most importantly, it is critical that we present a unified front.

Social Complexity as a Driver of Communication and Cognition.

Cognition and communication both can be essential for effectively navigating the social environment and thus, social dynamics could select for enhanced abilities for communication and superior cognition. Additionally, social experience can influence both the ability to communicate effectively and performance in cognitive tasks within an individual's lifetime, consistent with phenotypic plasticity in these traits. Historically, research in animal cognition and animal communication has often addressed these traits independently, despite potential commonalities in social function and underlying mechanisms of the brain. Integrating research on animal communication and cognition will provide a more comprehensive understanding of how the social environment may shape behavior and specializations of the brain for sociality through both evolutionary and developmental processes. This selective review of research on the impacts of social dynamics on cognition and communication in animals aims to highlight areas for future research at both the ultimate and proximate levels. In particular, additional work on the effects of the social environment on cognitive performance over an individual's lifetime, and comparative studies of specialized abilities for communication, should be pursued.

Contrasting styles in cognition and behaviour in bumblebees and honeybees

Bumblebees and honeybees have been the subjects of a great deal of recent research in animal cognition. Many of the major topics in cognition, including memory, attention, concept learning, numerosity, spatial cognition, timing, social learning, and metacognition have been examined in bumblebees, honeybees, or both. Although bumblebees and honeybees are very closely related, they also differ in important ways, including social organization, development, and foraging behaviour. We examine whether differences between bumblebees and honeybees in cognitive processes are related to differences in their natural history and behaviour. There are differences in some cognitive traits, such as serial reversal learning and matching-to-sample, that appear related to differences between bumblebees and honeybees in foraging and social behaviour. Other cognitive processes, such as numerosity, appear to be very similar. Despite the wealth of information that is available on some aspects of bumblebee and honeybee cognition and behaviour, there are relatively few instances, however, in which adequate data exist to make direct comparisons. We highlight a number of phenomena, including concept learning, spatial cognition, timing, and metacognition, for which targeted comparative research may reveal unexpected adaptive variation in cognitive processes in these complex animals. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: In Honor of Jerry Hogan.

Anthropomorphism, anthropectomy, and the null hypothesis

We examine the claim that the methodology of psychology leads to a bias in animal cognition research against attributing “anthropomorphic” properties to animals (Sober in Thinking with animals: new perspectives on anthropomorphism. Columbia University Press, New York, pp 85–99, 2005; de Waal in Philos Top 27:225–280, 1999). This charge is examined in light of a debate on the role of folk psychology between primatologists who emphasize similarities between humans and other apes, and those who emphasize differences. We argue that while in practice there is sometimes bias, either in the formulation of the null hypothesis or in the preference of Type-II errors over Type-I errors, the bias is not the result of proper use of the Neyman and Pearson hypothesis testing method. Psychologists’ preference for false negatives over false positives cannot justify a preference for avoiding anthropomorphic errors over anthropectic (Gk. anthropos—human; ektomia—to cut out) errors.

Marine mammal cognition and captive care: A proposal for cognitive enrichment in zoos and aquariums

Marine mammals, particularly cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) and pinnipeds (seals, sea lions and walruses) are popular in zoos and aquariums worldwide. Bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions have also been popular study species in animal cognition research since the 1950s, and many dolphin cognitive skills are on par with great apes. This paper proposes that ‘cognitive challenges’ can enhance the wellbeing of marine mammals, in line with previous studies on farm animals and great apes. While most captive marine mammals are trained and this challenges their social-cognitive skills to a moderate or high level, their physical-cognitive skills are not being challenged to a high level by floating ‘toys’ in the pool. This paper suggests that tasks originally developed to test the limits of dolphin and sea lion cognitive skill could be modified and implemented as ‘cognitive enrichment’ in zoos and aquariums. To be enriching, cognitive challenges should be relevant, motivating, controllable, and possible to master.

Do apes read minds?: toward a new folk psychology

An argument that as folk psychologists humans (and perhaps other animals) don't so much read minds as see one another as persons with traits, emotions, and social relations. By adulthood, most of us have become experts in human behavior, able to make sense of the myriad behaviors we find in environments ranging from the family home to the local mall and beyond. In philosophy of mind, our understanding of others has been largely explained in terms of knowing others' beliefs and desires; describing others' behavior in these terms is the core of what is known as folk psychology. In Do Apes Read Minds? Kristin Andrews challenges this view of folk psychology, arguing that we don't consider others' beliefs and desires when predicting most quotidian behavior, and that our explanations in these terms are often inaccurate or unhelpful. Rather than mindreading, or understanding others as receptacles for propositional attitudes, Andrews claims that folk psychologists see others first as whole persons with traits, emotions, and social relations. Drawing on research in developmental psychology, social psychology, and animal cognition, Andrews argues for a pluralistic folk psychology that employs different kinds of practices (including prediction, explanation, and justification) and different kinds of cognitive tools (including personality trait attribution, stereotype activation, inductive reasoning about past behavior, and generalization from self) that are involved in our folk psychological practices. According to this understanding of folk psychology-which does not require the sophisticated cognitive machinery of second-order metacognition associated with having a theory of mind-animals (including the other great apes) may be folk psychologists, too.

Taking personality selection bias seriously in animal cognition research: a case study in capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella)

In most experimental work on animal cognition, researchers attempt to control for multiple interacting variables by training subjects prior to testing, allowing subjects to participate voluntarily, and providing subjects with food rewards. However, do such methods encourage selection bias from subjects' personalities? In this study, we trained eighteen zoo-housed capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella) for two experiments, under conditions of positive reinforcement (i.e. food rewards) and free-choice participation. Using a combination of behavioral and rater-based methods, we identified and validated five personality dimensions in these capuchins (Assertiveness, Openness, Neuroticism, Sociability, and Attentiveness). Scores on Openness were positively related to individual differences in monkey task participation, reflecting previous work showing that such individuals are often more active, curious, and willing to engage in testing. We also found a negative relationship between scores on Assertiveness and performance on tasks, which may reflect the trade-offs between speed and accuracy in these animals' decision-making. Highly Assertive individuals (the most sociable within monkey groups) may also prioritize social interactions over engaging in research. Lastly, monkeys that consistently participated and performed well on both tasks showed significantly higher Openness and lower Assertiveness compared to others, mirroring relationships found between personality, participation, and performance among all participants. Participation and performance during training was clearly biased toward individuals with particular personalities (i.e. high Openness, low Assertiveness). Results are discussed in light of the need for careful interpretation of comparative data on animal cognition and the need for researchers to take personality selection bias more seriously.

Wild Minds: What People Think about Animal Thinking

ABSTRACTThe question of how nonhuman animals think is pervasive in the scientific and popular media, yet there is an apparent lack of concordance between findings from research in animal cognition and how this information emerges in popular discourse. The present study investigated the way people conceive of animal thinking, in order to inform the development of an exhibit on animal minds that will address this issue and foster a deeper connection between people and animals. This two-part, sequential study of perceptions of animal thinking used qualitative interviews of visitors to the New York Hall of Science and Staten Island Zoo to develop a quantitative, online consumer survey of American museum visitors. The results show that American museum visitors vary in their perceptions of animal thinking, but appear to be open to new ideas about how animals might think. Participants' responses to the interviews revealed they could easily recognize survival strategies in wild animals, but had reservations about discussions of empathy, deception, and awareness. In addition, animals kept as pets or companion animals in Western culture were commonly perceived to have higher cognitive capacities for thinking than food or other domestic animals. Participants' responses to the online consumer survey appeared to focus on an overall concept of animal thinking, rather than different cognitive dimensions. Although participants were generally neutral in their responses, demographic analysis revealed participants who had dogs and/or cats, a college education, or watched nature shows were more likely to support the belief that animals can think. Participants who had children at home were less likely to support this belief. Further research is needed to determine how different kinds of thought processes are understood by general audiences and how demographic factors might influence perceptions of animal thinking.

A cognitive model’s view of animal cognition

Abstract Although it is a relatively new field of study, the animal cognition literature is quite extensive and difficult to synthesize. This paper explores the contributions a comprehensive, computational, cognitive model can make toward organizing and assimilating this literature, as well as toward identifying important concepts and their interrelations. Using the LIDA model as an example, a framework is described within which to integrate the diverse research in animal cognition. Such a framework can provide both an ontology of concepts and their relations, and a working model of an animal’s cognitive processes that can compliment active empirical research. In addition to helping to account for a broad range of cognitive processes, such a model can help to comparatively assess the cognitive capabilities of different animal species. After deriving an ontology for animal cognition from the LIDA model, we apply it to develop the beginnings of a database that maps the cognitive facilities of a variety of animal species. We conclude by discussing future avenues of research, particularly the use of computational models of animal cognition as valuable tools for hypotheses generation and testing.