Anna Frohnwieser

University of Cambridge | Cam · Department of Psychology

Behavioral responses to novelty, including fear and subsequent avoidance of novel stimuli, i.e., neophobia, determine how animals interact with their environment. Neophobia aids in navigating risk and impacts on adaptability and survival. There is variation within and between individuals and species; however, lack of large-scale, comparative studie...

Delay of gratification–a form of self-control–is the ability to forsake immediately available rewards in order to obtain larger-valued outcomes in future, which develops throughout the pre-school years. The majority of previous research in this area has been conducted with Western populations, therefore knowledge of Eastern children’s performance i...

Behavioural responses to novelty, including fear and subsequent avoidance of novel stimuli, behaviours referred to as neophobia, determine how animals interact with their environment. Neophobia aids in navigating risk and impacts on adaptability and survival. There is variation within and between individuals and species, however, lack of large-scal...

Delay of gratification – a form of self-control – is the ability to forsake immediately available rewards in order to obtain larger-valued outcomes in future, which develops throughout the pre-school years. The majority of previous research in this area has been conducted with Western populations, therefore knowledge of Eastern children’s performan...

Delay of gratification – a form of self-control – is the ability to forsake immediately available rewards in order to obtain larger-valued outcomes in future, which develops throughout the pre-school years. The majority of previous research in this area has been conducted with Western populations, therefore knowledge of Eastern children’s performan...

Delay of gratification – a form of self-control – is the ability to forsake immediately available rewards in order to obtain larger-valued outcomes in future, which develops throughout the pre-school years. The majority of previous research in this area has been conducted with Western populations, therefore knowledge of Eastern children’s performan...

Preregistered Methodology for the paper: New Caledonian crows plan for specific future tool use http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.1490

This video is the supporting information video for the paper: New Caledonian crows flexibly plan for specific future tool use. Data was collected during the field season 2018 in New Caledonia. It shows an individual being tested in a future planning paradigm. Crows are given alternating trials condition 3 and 4, where they see the platform apparatu...

Prior Experience Tool Use Training: To train crows to use a stone as a tool, subjects were first trained to drop stones into the dispenser apparatus by placing small pieces of meat underneath a stone, which was placed on the edge to the opening of the dispenser. The pieces of meat gradually decreased in size and once the crow started pushing the st...

The ability to plan for future events is one of the defining features of human intelligence. Whether non-human animals can plan for specific future situations remains contentious: despite a sustained research effort over the last two decades, there is still no consensus on this question. Here, we show that New Caledonian crows can use tools to plan...

In adult humans, decisions involving the choice and use of tools for future events typically require episodic foresight. Previous studies suggest some non-human species are capable of future planning; however, these experiments often cannot fully exclude alternative learning explanations. Here, we used a novel tool-use paradigm aiming to address th...

The ability to make profitable decisions in natural foraging contexts may be influenced by an additional requirement of tool-use, due to increased levels of relational complexity and additional work-effort imposed by tool-use, compared with simply choosing between an immediate and delayed food item. We examined the flexibility for making the most p...

Previous research has suggested that adults are sometimes egocentric, erroneously attributing their current beliefs, perspectives and opinions to others. Interestingly, this egocentricity is sometimes stronger when perspective-taking than when working from functionally identical but non-perspectival rules. Much of our knowledge of egocentric bias c...

Self-control underlies cognitive abilities such as decision making and future planning. Delay of gratification is a measure of self-control and involves obtaining a more valuable outcome in the future by tolerating a delay or investing a greater effort in the present. Contextual issues, such as reward visibility and type, may influence delayed grat...

The ability to make profitable decisions in natural foraging contexts may be influenced by an additional requirement of tool-use, due to increased levels of relational complexity and additional work-effort imposed by tool-use, compared with simply choosing between an immediate and delayed food item. We examined the flexibility for making the most p...

Self‐control is critical for both humans and nonhuman animals because it underlies complex cognitive abilities, such as decision‐making and future planning, enabling goal‐directed behavior. For instance, it is positively associated with social competence and life success measures in humans. We present the first review of delay of gratification as a...

Data S1. Data on the Training Stages and Three Experiments, Related to Figures 1–3

One of the mysteries of animal problem-solving is the extent to which animals mentally represent problems in their minds. Humans can imagine both the solution to a problem and the stages along the way [1–3], such as when we plan one or two moves ahead in chess. The extent to which other animals can do the same is far less clear [4–25]. Here, we pre...

Artificial animals are increasingly used as conspecific stimuli in animal behavior research. However, researchers often have an incomplete understanding of how the species under study perceives conspecifics, and hence which features needed for a stimulus to be perceived appropriately. To investigate the features to which bearded dragons (Pogona vit...

Lateralized eye use is thought to increase brain efficiency, as the two hemispheres process different information perceived by the eyes. It has been observed in a wide variety of vertebrate species and, in general, information about conspecifics appears to elicit a left eye preference whilst information about prey elicits the opposite. In reptiles,...

Robotic animals are regularly used in behavioral experiments, typically in experimental interactions with individuals of the species they were modelled on. In order to do so successfully, these robots need to be designed carefully, taking into consideration the specific perceptual system of the model species. We used marker-based motion capture to...

In recent years, robotic animals and humans have been used to answer a variety of questions related to behavior. In the case of animal behavior, these efforts have largely been in the field of behavioral ecology. They have proved to be a useful tool for this enterprise as they allow the presentation of naturalistic social stimuli whilst providing t...

Humans have a natural desire to keep a certain spatial distance to other humans, called personal space (Hall, 1966). If personal space is invaded without consent physiological reactions such as increased heart rate, sweating, and increased blood pressure are triggered (Middlemist et al., 1976). Using a newly developed system called CCB Analyser...

Pigeons and humans are two highly visual species that have evolved separately for about 310 million years (Kumar and Hedges, 1998) and developed largely convergent visual systems due to similar visual needs. To investigate pigeon vision and cognitive abilities two dimensional pictorial stimuli are often used. However, it is not entirely clear, ho...

Humans have a natural desire to keep a certain physical distance from other humans. This distance is called personal space (or personal distance). Edward T. Hall (1966) describes it as a distance of 45 to 120cm kept from each other, a which people can touch if they extend their arms and see each other clearly, but not asa whole. Humans always tr...