scholarly journals A Bird's-Eye View: Core Knowledge in Wild North Island Robins of New Zealand

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Alexis Garland
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Ecological Validity ◽  
Psychological Theory ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Gaze Direction ◽  
Core Knowledge ◽  
Human Infants ◽  
Evolutionary Context ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
And Mathematics

<p>A prominent psychological theory on early cognitive development is Spelke’s Core Knowledge (CK) hypothesis (Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992), which posits that human infants, and possibly other species, are guided by innate understandings of how object movements, classification and quantification are governed by physical laws and, further, how agents are capable of perceptions and purposive action. CK is a set of cognitive building blocks, which serve as the foundation for more complex cognition such as acquisition and use of symbol systems pertaining to language and mathematics (Spelke, 2000). Evidence points to four core systems of knowledge: representation of number, object, space (or geometry) and agency. Investigation of spontaneous CK in nonhuman species in the wild is fundamental to understanding the ecological validity and evolutionary context for a set of systems that is proposed to be universally embedded. The bold, inquisitive manner, naïve fearlessness and unique insect caching behaviour of wild North Island robins (Petroica longipes) presents a unique opportunity to identify and characterise CK in a new model system. Six studies were conducted with the aim of investigating core developmental cognition in robins. The first three studies focused on perception of numerical quantity. Study 1 investigated the ability to discriminate between both large and small quantities, finding that robins successfully discriminate between unusually large quantities independent of ratio. Study 2 explored quantity discrimination in which summation of items is spatially distributed across an array, and found that while robins perform successfully with small numbers, the task presented substantially more cognitive demand. Study 3 measured robins’ reactions to computation by presenting simple addition and subtraction problems in a Violation of Expectancy (VoE) paradigm, finding that robins search longer when presented with a mathematically incongruent scenario. The last three studies focused on perception of agency. Study 4 investigated robins’ response to gaze direction in humans in a competitive paradigm, and found that they were sensitive to human gaze direction in all conditions but one. Study 5 explored perception of physical capability in humans, and results indicated that limb visibility significantly influences pilfering choice. Study 6 examined robins’ perception of animacy in prey, finding that in a VoE paradigm, robins’ expectation of hidden prey continuity varies depending on mobility and animacy. Taken together, the results of these six studies suggest that while supportive of fundamental characteristics defining basic Core Knowledge in many ways, some unique results in the cognitive abilities of this biologically naïve species shed new light on our growing understanding of the shared basis of cognition. A deeper look at avian performance in core developmental tasks, especially in a naïve wild population, can offer new insights into sweeping evolutionary theories that underpin basic cognitive mechanisms.</p>

scholarly journals A Bird's-Eye View: Core Knowledge in Wild North Island Robins of New Zealand

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Alexis Garland
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Ecological Validity ◽  
Psychological Theory ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Gaze Direction ◽  
Core Knowledge ◽  
Human Infants ◽  
Evolutionary Context ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
And Mathematics

<p>A prominent psychological theory on early cognitive development is Spelke’s Core Knowledge (CK) hypothesis (Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992), which posits that human infants, and possibly other species, are guided by innate understandings of how object movements, classification and quantification are governed by physical laws and, further, how agents are capable of perceptions and purposive action. CK is a set of cognitive building blocks, which serve as the foundation for more complex cognition such as acquisition and use of symbol systems pertaining to language and mathematics (Spelke, 2000). Evidence points to four core systems of knowledge: representation of number, object, space (or geometry) and agency. Investigation of spontaneous CK in nonhuman species in the wild is fundamental to understanding the ecological validity and evolutionary context for a set of systems that is proposed to be universally embedded. The bold, inquisitive manner, naïve fearlessness and unique insect caching behaviour of wild North Island robins (Petroica longipes) presents a unique opportunity to identify and characterise CK in a new model system. Six studies were conducted with the aim of investigating core developmental cognition in robins. The first three studies focused on perception of numerical quantity. Study 1 investigated the ability to discriminate between both large and small quantities, finding that robins successfully discriminate between unusually large quantities independent of ratio. Study 2 explored quantity discrimination in which summation of items is spatially distributed across an array, and found that while robins perform successfully with small numbers, the task presented substantially more cognitive demand. Study 3 measured robins’ reactions to computation by presenting simple addition and subtraction problems in a Violation of Expectancy (VoE) paradigm, finding that robins search longer when presented with a mathematically incongruent scenario. The last three studies focused on perception of agency. Study 4 investigated robins’ response to gaze direction in humans in a competitive paradigm, and found that they were sensitive to human gaze direction in all conditions but one. Study 5 explored perception of physical capability in humans, and results indicated that limb visibility significantly influences pilfering choice. Study 6 examined robins’ perception of animacy in prey, finding that in a VoE paradigm, robins’ expectation of hidden prey continuity varies depending on mobility and animacy. Taken together, the results of these six studies suggest that while supportive of fundamental characteristics defining basic Core Knowledge in many ways, some unique results in the cognitive abilities of this biologically naïve species shed new light on our growing understanding of the shared basis of cognition. A deeper look at avian performance in core developmental tasks, especially in a naïve wild population, can offer new insights into sweeping evolutionary theories that underpin basic cognitive mechanisms.</p>

scholarly journals Numerical assessment in the wild: insights from social carnivores

2018 ◽  
Vol 373 (1740) ◽  
pp. 20160508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Benson-Amram ◽  
Geoff Gilfillan ◽  
Karen McComb
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Wild Animals ◽  
Playback Experiments ◽  
Natural Habitats ◽  
Numerical Assessment ◽  
Individual Discrimination ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
Assessment Skills ◽  
In The Wild

Playback experiments have proved to be a useful tool to investigate the extent to which wild animals understand numerical concepts and the factors that play into their decisions to respond to different numbers of vocalizing conspecifics. In particular, playback experiments have broadened our understanding of the cognitive abilities of historically understudied species that are challenging to test in the traditional laboratory, such as members of the Order Carnivora. Additionally, playback experiments allow us to assess the importance of numerical information versus other ecologically important variables when animals are making adaptive decisions in their natural habitats. Here, we begin by reviewing what we know about quantity discrimination in carnivores from studies conducted in captivity. We then review a series of playback experiments conducted with wild social carnivores, including African lions, spotted hyenas and wolves, which demonstrate that these animals can assess the number of conspecifics calling and respond based on numerical advantage. We discuss how the wild studies complement those conducted in captivity and allow us to gain insights into why wild animals may not always respond based solely on differences in quantity. We then consider the key roles that individual discrimination and cross-modal recognition play in the ability of animals to assess the number of conspecifics vocalizing nearby. Finally, we explore new directions for future research in this area, highlighting in particular the need for further work on the cognitive basis of numerical assessment skills and experimental paradigms that can be effective in both captive and wild settings. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The origins of numerical abilities’.

scholarly journals Giving and taking: Representational building blocks of active resource-transfer events in human infants

Cognition ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 137 ◽  
pp. 47-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Tatone ◽  
Alessandra Geraci ◽  
Gergely Csibra
Keyword(s):  
Building Blocks ◽  
Human Infants ◽  
Resource Transfer

scholarly journals Cognitive Abilities in the Wild: Population-scale game-based cognitive assessment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mads Kock Pedersen ◽  
Carlos Mauricio Castaño Díaz ◽  
Mario Alejandro Alba-Marrugo ◽  
Ali Amidi ◽  
Rajiv Vaid Basaiwmoit ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Wild Population ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Large Population ◽  
Population Sample ◽  
The Social ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Large Population Sample ◽  
Key Questions ◽  
Unique Dataset

Psychology and the social sciences are undergoing a revolution: It has become increasingly clear that traditional lab-based experiments fail to capture the full range of differences in cognitive abilities and behaviours across the general population. Some progress has been made toward devising measures that can be applied at scale across individuals and populations. What has been missing is a broad battery of validated tasks that can be easily deployed, used across different age ranges and social backgrounds, and employed in practical, clinical, and research contexts. Here, we present Skill Lab, a game-based approach allowing the efficient assessment of a suite of cognitive abilities. Skill Lab has been validated outside the lab in a crowdsourced population-size sample recruited in collaboration with the Danish Broadcast Company (Danmarks Radio, DR). Our game-based measures are five times faster to complete than the equivalent traditional measures and replicate previous findings on the decline of cognitive abilities with age in a large population sample. Furthermore, by combining the game data with an in-game survey, we demonstrate that this unique dataset has implication for key questions in social science, challenging the Jack-of-all-Trades theory of entrepreneurship and provide evidence for risk preference being independent of executive functioning.

scholarly journals Engineering the quantum-classical interface of solid-state qubits

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
David J Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Information ◽  
Solid State ◽  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Technology Development ◽  
Fault Tolerant ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Experimental Physicist ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Classical Control ◽  
And Control

AbstractSpanning a range of hardware platforms, the building-blocks of quantum processors are today sufficiently advanced to begin work on scaling-up these systems into complex quantum machines. A key subsystem of all quantum machinery is the interface between the isolated qubits that encode quantum information and the classical control and readout technology needed to operate them. As few-qubit devices are combined to construct larger, fault-tolerant quantum systems in the near future, the quantum-classical interface will pose new challenges that increasingly require approaches from the engineering disciplines in combination with continued fundamental advances in physics, materials and mathematics. This review describes the subsystems comprising the quantum-classical interface from the viewpoint of an engineer, experimental physicist or student wanting to enter the field of solid-state quantum information technology. The fundamental signalling operations of readout and control are reviewed for a variety of qubit platforms, including spin systems, superconducting implementations and future devices based on topological degrees-of-freedom. New engineering opportunities for technology development at the boundary between qubits and their control hardware are identified, transversing electronics to cryogenics.

scholarly journals Self-Esteem and Motivation for Learning in Academic Achievement: The Mediating Role of Reasoning and Verbal Fluidity

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 5768
Author(s):  
Nieves Moyano ◽  
Alberto Quílez-Robres ◽  
Alejandra Cortés Pascual
Keyword(s):  
Academic Achievement ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Verbal Fluency ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Cognitive Factors ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
Motivation For Learning ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
The One

The goal of the present study was to analyze the joint role that non-cognitive (motivation and self-esteem) and cognitive (verbal fluency and reasoning) factors play on academic achievement, both as a global score and in relation to specific subjects, such as language and literature and mathematics. We also analyzed the mediating role of cognitive factors. We recruited a sample of 133 primary education students (aged 6–9 years old) (47.6% girls, 52.6% boys), to whom various measures of the above-indicated variables were administered. Several predictive models were tested through a mediational regression analysis. The results indicated the relevance of intrinsic motivation together with self-esteem as predictors of academic achievement mediated by the cognitive abilities verbal fluency and reasoning. These relationships differed depending on the specific subject. We discuss the educational implications of these findings and emphasize, on the one hand, that academic achievement depends on both cognitive and non-cognitive factors and, on the other hand, the malleability of cognitive factors, as they seem to improve based on motivation and self-esteem.

How Birds Behave

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wenfei Tong
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Alarm Calls ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Territory Defence ◽  
The World ◽  
Evolutionary Context ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Nest Design ◽  
The Many

Birds are intelligent, sociable creatures that exhibit a wide array of behaviours – from mobbing and mimicking to mating and joint nesting. Why do they behave as they do? Bringing to light the remarkable actions of birds through examples from species around the world, How Birds Behave presents engaging vignettes about the private lives of birds, all explained in an evolutionary context. We discover how birds find food, relying on foraging techniques, tools and thievery. We learn about the courtship rituals through which birds choose, compete for, woo and win mates; the familial conflicts that crop up among parents, offspring and siblings; and the stresses and strains of nesting, including territory defence, nepotism and relationship sabotage. We see how birds respond to threats and danger – through such unique practices as murmurations, specific alarm calls, distraction displays and antipredator nest design. We also read about how birds change certain behaviours – preening, migration, breeding and huddling – based on climate. Richly illustrated, this book explores the increasing focus on how individual birds differ in personality and how big data and citizen scientists are helping to add to what we know about them. Drawing on classic examples and the latest research, How Birds Behave offers a close-up look at the many ways birds conduct themselves in the wild.

scholarly journals A naturalistic paradigm simulating gaze-based social interactions for the investigation of social agency

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 1044-1055
Author(s):  
Marie-Luise Brandi ◽  
Daniela Kaifel ◽  
Juha M. Lahnakoski ◽  
Leonhard Schilbach
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Ecological Validity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Behavioral Data ◽  
Gaze Direction ◽  
Social Agency ◽  
Gaze Behavior ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Real Person

Abstract Sense of agency describes the experience of being the cause of one’s own actions and the resulting effects. In a social interaction, one’s actions may also have a perceivable effect on the actions of others. In this article, we refer to the experience of being responsible for the behavior of others as social agency, which has important implications for the success or failure of social interactions. Gaze-contingent eyetracking paradigms provide a useful tool to analyze social agency in an experimentally controlled manner, but the current methods are lacking in terms of their ecological validity. We applied this technique in a novel task using video stimuli of real gaze behavior to simulate a gaze-based social interaction. This enabled us to create the impression of a live interaction with another person while being able to manipulate the gaze contingency and congruency shown by the simulated interaction partner in a continuous manner. Behavioral data demonstrated that participants believed they were interacting with a real person and that systematic changes in the responsiveness of the simulated partner modulated the experience of social agency. More specifically, gaze contingency (temporal relatedness) and gaze congruency (gaze direction relative to the participant’s gaze) influenced the explicit sense of being responsible for the behavior of the other. In general, our study introduces a new naturalistic task to simulate gaze-based social interactions and demonstrates that it is suitable to studying the explicit experience of social agency.

Applying Engineering Models of Human Behavior to Space Flight Performance

2005 ◽  
Vol 49 (23) ◽  
pp. 2023-2027
Author(s):  
Alonso H. Vera ◽  
Richard Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Human Performance ◽  
Psychological Theory ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Design Guidelines ◽  
Task Structure ◽  
Behavioral Consequences ◽  
Modeling Tools ◽  
Skill Sets ◽  
High Level ◽  
Speed Accuracy

Most complex human-device interactions that arise in realistic applied settings are heterogeneous along several dimensions that significantly restrict the scope and effectiveness of traditional modeling tools. In particular, different subcomponents of the same overall task may vary significantly with respect to practice level and speed-accuracy tradeoffs. The goal of this paper is to lay out the path toward a set of technologies and underlying psychological theory that will permit rapid modeling of such heterogeneous tasks, and therefore rapid evaluation of proposed interface and task structure designs. It will be critical to make progress toward the goal in three specific ways: (1) Development of simple, high-level languages that permit the rapid specification of new tasks composed hierarchically from existing task and cognitive architectural building blocks; (2) Development of the technology and underlying psychological theory that will permit the system engineers to specify the degree of learning or skill associated with separate subcomponents of the overall task, and derive the behavioral consequences of those skill assumptions without simulating the learning process itself; and (3) Develop the technology and theory that will permit the system designers and engineers to specify speed-accuracy tradeoffs separately for subcomponents of the overall task, and derive the behavioral consequences of those assumptions in concert with the skill assumptions. The outcome of such efforts will support the development of modeling tools and design guidelines for mission systems based on common skill sets and allow prediction of learning and performance time for such systems. Directly supporting two central Human-Systems Integration themes, this paper will focus on modeling tools and models needed to support prediction of degrading human performance over the duration of reference missions toward informing the design of systems to mitigate these effects.

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