Melissa Johnston

Melissa Johnston
Autonomous University of Barcelona | UAB · Institute of Neuroscience (INc)

Doctor of Philosophy

About

17
Publications
3,767
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165
Citations
Additional affiliations
October 2021 - present
University of Tübingen
Position
  • Fellow
October 2020 - September 2021
University of Tübingen
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Education
February 2011 - December 2019
University of Otago
Field of study

Publications

Publications (17)
Article
Liao et al. demonstrated that crows can count out loud, revealing a level of vocal control previously unobserved in nonhuman species. This discovery suggests that rather than being judged by primate standards, birds might represent a new benchmark for vocal and perhaps broader cognitive abilities.
Article
Statistical inference, the ability to use limited information to draw conclusions about the likelihood of an event, is critical for decision-making during uncertainty. The ability to make statistical inferences was thought to be a uniquely human skill requiring verbal instruction and mathematical reasoning.1 However, basic inferences have been demo...
Article
Full-text available
Recursion, the process of embedding structures within similar structures, is often considered a foundation of symbolic competence and a uniquely human capability. To understand its evolution, we can study the recursive aptitudes of nonhuman animals. We adopted the behavioral protocol of a recent study demonstrating that humans and nonhuman primates...
Article
We examined the role of the avian hippocampus and area parahippocampalis in serial‐order behavior and a variety of other tasks known to be sensitive to hippocampal damage in mammals. Damage to the hippocampus and area parahippocampalis caused impairments in autoshaping and performance on an analogue of a radial‐arm maze task, but had no effect on a...
Article
Full-text available
Neurons in the pigeon nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL) are important for the maintenance of information across delays as long as 3 s. In the current study, we recorded neural activity from the avian NCL of 3 birds trained on a working memory task with three different delay lengths intermixed within a session. We found that when the birds are unable...
Chapter
In this encyclopedia chapter (Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior), we examine delay activity from a comparative perspective. Delay neurons are found not only in humans, but also in all nonhuman species examined, including primates, birds, and rodents. In all species, delay neurons have been identified in sensory-specific regions such a...
Article
The aim of the current study was to assess whether pigeons could acquire a four-item list by trial and error. Pigeons received either extensive list training prior to being tested on a novel four-item list (i.e., the full-training group) or very limited training (i.e., the limited-training group). Specifically, subjects in the full-training group w...
Article
Johnston M, Clarkson AN, Gowing EK, Scarf D, Colombo M. Effects of nidopallium caudolaterale inactivation on serial-order behavior in pigeons (Columba livia).Serial-order behavior is the ability to complete a sequence of responses in a predetermined order to achieve a reward. In birds, serial-order behavior is thought to be impaired by damage to th...
Chapter
Full-text available
Whether animals can engage in prospective processing, looking ahead to what needs to be done, is an area of current interest in comparative cognition. We review some of the early behavioural and more recent neural evidence for prospective processing. Three classic behavioural studies, each adopting a different technique (confusion matrix design, sa...
Article
Full-text available
Four birds were trained on a delayed matching-to-sample task with common outcomes where correct responses during both red and green trials yielded reward. We recorded neuronal activity from the avian nidopallium caudolaterale, the avian equivalent of the mammalian prefrontal cortex, and the avian nidopallium frontolaterale, a higher-order visual pr...
Chapter
Full-text available
Article
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h i g h l i g h t s • Delay activity in entopallium represents a neural correlate for the to-be-remembered visual stimuli. • Delay activity in NCL represents a neural correlate for the upcoming reward. • Both of these are regions are modulated by external factors and do not exclusively code visual or reward information. a b s t r a c t We recorded...
Chapter
Full-text available
We review Part Three, " Whines and Pet Peeves, " of Safina's book Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. Part Three is concerned mainly with the evidence for Theory of Mind in nonhuman animals. Like Safina, we believe that animals have a Theory of Mind, and like Safina, we question the utility of such concepts. There are many studies that Safin...
Article
Full-text available
In the present study we investigate the visual responsiveness of neurons in the entopallium, arcopallium, nidopallium, and hippocampus of pigeons. Pigeons were presented with 12 different stimuli, including three stimuli of a pigeon (a portrait of a pigeon’s face, a profile view of a pigeon’s face, and a picture of a whole pigeon). A total of 53 ce...

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