Jackie Chappell

• D Phil Zoology
• Senior Lecturer in Animal Behaviour at University of Birmingham

Background Understanding the needs of animals with physical and cognitive impairments is essential for zoos, rehabilitation centres, and other captive contexts. This case study describes the atypical physical and cognitive development of Jiwa, an adult male Sumatran orangutan ( Pongo abelii ), to evaluate how these differences may impact Jiwa and t...

Wild orangutans ( Pongo spp.) rescued from human-wildlife conflict must be adequately rehabilitated before being returned to the wild. It is essential that released orangutans are able to cope with stressful challenges such as food scarcity, navigating unfamiliar environments, and regaining independence from human support. Although practical skills...

It remains unclear when and why the ability to copy actions evolved and also its uniqueness to humans. Thus far, a lack of valid evidence for spontaneous action copying by other apes supports the view that only humans spontaneously copy actions. However, wild apes have access to multiple demonstrators and have been demonstrated to be affected by ma...

Behavior is the interface through which animals interact with their environments, and therefore has potentially cascading impacts on the health of individuals, populations, their habitats, and the humans that share them. Evolution has shaped the interaction between species and their environments. Thus, alterations to the species-typical “wild-type”...

The Enclosure Design Tool framework translates research on wild great apes into enclosure modifications that sanctuaries can use to increase wild-type behaviours for apes in their care. The underpinning concept is to create species-appropriate challenge, choice and control through 'functional' enclosures where the environments in which the animals...

Children easily learn about tools from others, but have difficulty innovating tools independently. The current studies combine these research areas and explore the social influences on children’s ability to innovate their own tools from already modified materials. In Experiment 1 (N = 104) 5- to- 8-year-olds were unaffected by statements of designe...

Arboreal, and in particular suspensory, postures may elicit a preference for the strongest limb to be used in postural support in large bodied primates. However, selection may have favored ambilaterality rather than a preference for a particular hand in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) fishing arboreally for ants. To investigate the influence of arbor...

One contribution of 13 to a theme issue 'Physiological determinants of social behaviour in animals'. Group living has been proposed to yield benefits that enhance fitness above the level that would be achieved through living as solitary individuals. Dominance hierarchies occur commonly in these social assemblages, and result, by definition, in reso...

Kabadayi, Taylor, von Bayern, and Osvath (2016, Royal Society Open Science, 3, 160104) recently showed that among birds, absolute brain size predicts performance on a motor self-control task thought to be important for cognition. However, birds performed at an equivalent level to much larger-brained primates, opening up the debate about brain size...

Recent studies of children’s tool innovation have revealed that there is variation in children’s success in middle-childhood. In two individual differences studies, we sought to identify personal characteristics that might predict success on an innovation task. In Study 1, we found that although measures of divergent thinking were related to each o...

We often encounter problems in which our usual learned solutions are ineffective. In such situations, we may know what problem we face, and what we want to achieve, but we must generate new behavior to bridge the gap between the current situation and the desired result. In this chapter, we discuss why this process of innovation is important for hum...

For orangutans, the largest predominantly arboreal primates, discontinuous canopy presents a particular challenge. The shortest gaps between trees lie between thin peripheral branches, which offer the least stability to large animals. The affordances of the forest canopy experienced by orangutans of different ages however, must vary substantially a...

In three studies, we explored the retention and transfer of tool-making knowledge, learnt from an adult demonstration, to other temporal and task contexts. All studies used a variation of a task in which children had to make a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tall transparent tube. Children who failed to innovate the hook tool independently sa...

Tool innovation—designing and making novel tools to solve tasks—is extremely difficult for young children. To discover why this might be, we highlighted different aspects of tool making to children aged 4 to 6 years (N = 110). Older children successfully innovated the means to make a hook after seeing the pre-made target tool only if they had a cha...

Most animals navigate a dynamic and shifting sea of information provided by their environment, their food or prey and other animals. How do they work out, which pieces of information are the most important or of most interest to them, and gather information on those parts to guide their action later? In this essay, I briefly outline what we already...

We know that even young children are proficient tool users, but until recently, little was known about how they make tools. Here, we will explore the concepts underlying tool making, and the kinds of information and putative cognitive abilities required for children to manufacture novel tools. We will review the evidence for novel tool manufacture...

The ability to identify an appropriate sequence of actions or to consider alternative possible action sequences might be particularly useful during problem solving in the physical domain. We developed a new 'paddle-box' task to test the ability of different ape species to plan an appropriate sequence of physical actions (rotating paddles) to retrie...

Faced with a vast, dynamic environment, some animals and robots of-ten need to acquire and segregate information about objects. The form of their internal representation depends on how the information is utilised. Sometimes it should be compressed and abstracted from the original, often complex, sensory information, so it can be efficiently stored...

Humans are expert tool users, who manipulate objects with dextrous hands and precise visual control. Surprisingly, morphological predispositions, or adaptations, for tool use have rarely been examined in non-human animals. New Caledonian crows Corvus moneduloides use their bills to craft complex tools from sticks, leaves and other materials, before...

Do we fully understand the structure of the problems we present to our subjects in experiments on animal cognition, and the information required to solve them? While we currently have a good understanding of the behavioural and neurobiological mechanisms underlying associative learning processes, we understand much less about the mechanisms underly...

Background / Purpose: The cognitive capacity for short-term planning (i.e. mentally “trying out” potential action sequences prior to execution) has been investigated experimentally in several species. However, the majority of these studies have either involved tool-use, which biases against non-tool-using species, or used computerised tasks, whic...

Recent data show that human children (up to 8 years old) perform poorly when required to innovate tools. Our tool-rich culture may be more reliant on social learning and more limited by domain-general constraints such as ill-structured problem solving than otherwise thought.

New Caledonian crows, spiders, and robots use and can construct objects outside their own body ("tools") to act on the outside world toward some goal. In all cases, each instance of tool making or use is different from previous ones, so that variability in the tasks' needs leads to variations in behavior. Tool use is considered by many to be one of...

Background / Purpose: The majority of animal intelligence research has focused on establishing what cognitive capacities of different species are, rather than how animals acquire and structure information to support learning, specifically through exploratory behavior. Main conclusion: We believe exploration is not random, but, rather, that it...

Background / Purpose: The majority of animal intelligence research has focused on establishing what cognitive capacities of different species are, rather than how animals acquire and structure information to support learning, specifically through exploratory behaviour. We believe exploration is not random; rather, it is structured, selective and...

Background / Purpose: Piaget’s view – that children learn through play and exploration – is widely accepted as being integral to cognitive development. However, Surprisingly few scientists have systematically investigated how exploration is structured to support learning mechanisms in different situations, and even fewer have studied it in non-hu...

Imagine a situation in which you had to design a physical agent that could collect information from its environment, then store and process that information to help it respond appropriately to novel situations. What kinds of information should it attend to? How should the information be represented so as to allow efficient use and re-use? What kind...

Apparently sophisticated behaviour during problem-solving is often the product of simple underlying mechanisms, such as associative learning or the use of procedural rules. These and other more parsimonious explanations need to be eliminated before higher-level cognitive processes such as causal reasoning or planning can be inferred. We presented t...

Parrots are exceptional among birds for their high levels of exploratory behaviour and manipulatory abilities. It has been argued that foraging method is the prime determinant of a bird's visual field configuration. However, here we argue that the topography of visual fields in parrots is related to their playful dexterity, unique anatomy and parti...

Tool making evidences intelligent, flexible thinking. In Experiment 1, we confirmed that 4- to 7-year-olds chose a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tube. In Experiment 2, 3- to 5-year-olds consistently failed to innovate a simple hook tool. Eight-year-olds performed at mature levels. In contrast, making a tool following demonstration was easy...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Animal Cognition(AC) share a common goal: to study learning and causal understanding. However, the perspectives are completely different: while AC studies intelligent systems present in nature, AI tries to to build them almost from scratch. It is proposed here that both visions are complementary and should interact...

Biology, and particularly the study of 'natural intelligence', has long provided diverse forms of inspiration for AI and robotics re-searchers. However, instances of biologists gaining inspiration from AI have been less common. In this paper (written as an introduc-tion to the AI-Inspired Biology Symposium), we argue that there are many ways in whi...

Jablonka & Lamb (J&L) refer only implicitly to aspects of cognitive competence that preceded both evolution of human language and language learning in children. These aspects are important for evolution and development but need to be understood using the design-stance, which the book adopts only for molecular and genetic processes, not for behaviou...

The full variety of powerful information-processing mechanisms 'discovered' by evolution has not yet been re-discovered by scientists and engineers. By attending closely to the diversity of biological phenomena, we may gain new insights into (a) how evolution happens, (b) what sorts of mechanisms, forms of representation, types of learning and deve...

Although rooks are considered non-tool-using animals, a recent study has shown that they learn to solve a 'trap-tube' task faster than many tool-using primates, raising questions about the evolution of sophisticated physical cognition.

In the Company of Crows and Ravens traces the relationship between man and one group of feathered friends.

Several high level methodological debates among AI researchers, linguists, psychologists and philosophers, appear to be endless, e.g. about the need for and nature of representations, about the role of symbolic processes, about embodiment, about situatedness, about whether symbol-grounding is needed, and about whether a robot needs any knowledge at...

New Caledonian Crows Corvus moneduloides are known to be extraordinary tool makers and users, but little is known of other aspects of their biology. Here, we report recent field observations of their behaviour and ecology, along with measurements of 19 morphological traits and two flight performance parameters taken from 22 captured Crows. These me...

We studied laterality of tool use in 10 captive New Caledonian (NC) crows (Corvus moneduloides). All subjects showed near-exclusive individual laterality, but there was no overall bias in either direction (five were left-lateralized and five were right-lateralized). This is consistent with results in non-human primates, which show strong individual...

One important element of complex and flexible tool use, particularly where tool manufacture is involved, is the ability to select or manufacture appropriate tools anticipating the needs of any given task-an ability that has been rarely tested in non-primates. We examine aspects of this ability in New Caledonian crows-a species known to be extraordi...

Previous research has suggested social learning of foraging behavior can inhibit learning of the optimal behavior pattern. Based on their transmission chain design, we used small groups of guppies (Poecilia reticulata) to determine the degree to which the optimal behavior pattern was inhibited by socially learned information. A founder group was tr...

Many animals use tools, but their understanding of physical forces or causal relations is unclear ([1][1], [2][2]). Primates are considered the most versatile and complex tool users, but observations of New Caledonian crows ( Corvus moneduloides ) ([3–5][3]) raise the possibility that these birds

We present an experiment showing that New Caledonian crows are able to choose tools of the appropriate size for a novel task, without trial-and-error learning. This species is almost unique amongst all animal species (together with a few primates) in the degree of use and manufacture of polymorphic tools in the wild. However, until now, the flexibi...

It seems reasonable to assume that pigeons use visual features in the landscape for orientation when they are homing over familiar terrain. Experimental evidence to prove or disprove this possibility is, however, difficult to obtain. Here, we link the problem with the observation that deflections of initial orientation caused by clock-shift are oft...

This paper discusses some of the long term objectives of cognitive robotics and some of the requirements for meet- ing those objectives that are still a very long way off. These include requirements for visual perception, for architectures, for kinds of learning, and for innate competences needed to drive learning and development in a variety of di...

Although the use of olfactory cues in pigeon navigation is well established, the generality of olfactory navigation remains uncertain because of apparent variability in results gained by different researchers in different regions. We report the results of the first experiments investigating the effect of anosmia on homing pigeons reared in a previo...

Clock-shifting (altering the phase of the internal clock) in homing pigeons leads to a deflection in the vanishing bearing of the clock-shifted group relative to controls. However, two unexplained phenomena are common in clock-shift experiments: the vanishing bearings of the clock-shifted group are often more scattered (with a shorter vector length...

A potentially valuable method for investigating the role of visual landmarks in the familiar area map is to use an open-field arena food-searching task, allowing landmarks and the sun compass to be independently manipulated. In previous such experiments performed outdoors, homing pigeons,Columba liviaprimarily used the sun compass rather than visua...

Using the flocking tendencies of homing pigeons (Columba livia) in flight, a first attempt was made to test directly the hypothesis that group movement may have a navigational function. We manipulated the potential advantage of transfer of navigational information by releasing pairs of homing pigeons in which none, one or both of the birds had prev...

Although much is now known about the navigational strategies of homing pigeons, Columba livia, much less is understood about the nature of their familiar area map. Although familiar visual landmarks are probably important, it is not yet known whether birds can pilot using the arrangement of landmarks directly, or whether landmarks merely specify su...