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23
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Introduction
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November 2016 - November 2018
October 2012 - April 2016
Education
October 2012 - July 2016
September 2009 - June 2011
Publications
Publications (23)
Neophobia, or aversion to novelty, is important for adaptability and survival as it influences the ways in which animals navigate risk and interact with their environments. Across taxa, species and individuals, neophobia is found to vary considerably, but exploring the wider evolutionary drivers of neophobia is hampered by a lack of comparative mul...
Weight, though it cannot be seen directly, pervades nearly every aspect of an animal’s life. However, the extent to which non-human animals reason about the property of weight remains poorly understood. Recent evidence highlights birds as a promising group for testing this ability: for example, New Caledonian crows can infer the weight of objects a...
Long-term memory — information retention over long timescales — can allow animals to retain foraging skills and efficiently respond to seasonal and changing environments. Most long-term memory research is with captive species, focusing on spatial, individual or object recognition, with less known about wild species and the retention of motor task a...
Animal play behavior has received increasing attention for its relationship to cognition as a possible precursor to physical problem-solving abilities across taxa. In birds, captive studies reveal that exploring and combining novel objects correlates with advanced problem solving. However, we lack systematic investigations in the wild, thus limitin...
Innovation (i.e., a new solution to a familiar problem, or applying an existing behavior to a novel problem) plays a fundamental role in species’ ecology and evolution. It can be a useful measure for cross-group comparisons of behavioral and cognitive flexibility and a proxy for general intelligence. Among birds, experimental studies of innovation...
Comparative cognitive and behavior research aims to investigate cognitive evolution by comparing performance in different species to understand how these abilities have evolved. Ideally, this requires large and diverse samples; however, these can be difficult to obtain by single labs or institutions, leading to potential reproducibility and general...
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...
Paying attention to weight is important when deciding upon an object's efficacy or value in various contexts (e.g. tool use, foraging). Proprioceptive discrimination learning, with objects that differ only in weight, has so far been investigated almost exclusively in primate species. Here, we show that while Goffin's cockatoos learn faster when add...
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...
Comparative cognitive and behaviour research aims to investigate cognitive evolution by comparing performance in different species to understand how these abilities have evolved. Ideally, this requires large and diverse samples, however, these can be difficult to obtain by single labs or institutions, leading to potential reproducibility and genera...
Tool use research has suffered from a lack of consistent theoretical frameworks. There is a plethora of tool use definitions and the most widespread ones are so inclusive that the behaviors that fall under them arguably do not have much in common. The situation is aggravated by the prevalence of anecdotes, which have played an undue role in the lit...
From an early age, children explore their environment in a way suggesting that they reason about causal variables and seek causal explanations. Indeed, following extensive studies of problem-solving abilities in chimpanzees, Povinelli (Folk Physics for Apes, Oxford University Press, 2000) proposed that this ability to reason about unobservable vari...
Measuring the responses of non-human animals to situations of uncertainty is thought to shed light on an animal’s metacognitive processes; namely, whether they monitor their own knowledge states. For example, when presented with a foraging task, great apes and macaques selectively seek information about the location of a food item when they have no...
Allogrooming in primates serves not only a hygienic function, but also plays a crucial role in maintaining strong affiliative bonds between group members, which in turn, underpin the emergence of cooperative behavior. In contrast, although allopreening occurs in many avian species, we know little about its social functions. Our study addresses this...
When humans plan for the future, we recognize not only that one particular event may occur, but that the future can have different, mutually exclusive possible outcomes. A recent study by Suddendorf et al (Suddendorf 2017 Biol. Lett.13, 20170170 (doi:10.1098/rsbl.2017.0170)) suggests that young children (less than 3 years) and apes lack this capaci...
A range of non-human animals frequently manipulate and explore objects in their environment, which may enable them to learn about physical properties and potentially form more abstract concepts of properties such as weight and rigidity. Whether animals can apply the information learned during their exploration to solve novel problems, however, and...
Supplementary Methods and Results: Function and Flexibility of Object Exploration in Kea and New Caledonian Crows
While social learning has been demonstrated in species across many taxa, the role it plays in everyday foraging decisions is not well understood. Investigating social learning during foraging could shed light on the emergence of cultural variation in different groups. We used an open diffusion experiment to examine the spread of a novel foraging te...
Keywords: altruism avian cognition corvid Corvus corax prosociality raven In recent years, there has been considerable research effort to determine whether other species exhibit prosocial motivations parallel to those of humans; however, these studies have focused primarily on primates, and with mixed results. We presented captive ravens with a mod...
Parrots are frequently cited for their sophisticated problem-solving abilities, but cases of habitual tool use among psittacines are scarce. We report the first evidence, to our knowledge, of tool use by greater vasa parrots (Coracopsis vasa). Several members of a captive population spontaneously adopted a novel tool-using technique by using pebble...
The extent to which humans help each other is extraordinary in itself, and difficult to explain from an evolutionary perspective. Therefore, there has been a recent surge in studies investigating the evolution of prosocial behavior using a comparative approach. Nevertheless, most of these studies have focused on primates only, and little is known a...
Right-hand dominance is widely considered to be a uniquely human trait. Whether nonhuman primates exhibit similar population-level hand preferences remains a topic of considerable debate. Despite extensive research focusing on laterality in nonhuman primates, our interpretation of these studies is limited due to methodological issues including the...
