4.7 Article

Kea (Nestor notabilis) fail a loose-string connectivity task

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SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
卷 11, 期 1, 页码 -

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NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-94879-x

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  1. Templeton World Charity Foundation
  2. Rutherford Discovery Fellowship

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The study tested the cognitive abilities of kea parrots in horizontal connectivity tasks and found that they failed the task both before and after perceptual-motor feedback experience, indicating that kea do not mentally simulate their string-pulling actions and that perceptual-motor feedback alone is not sufficient for successful performance. This suggests a more complex interplay of cognitive factors underlies this iconic example of animal problem-solving.
Naive individuals of some bird species can rapidly solve vertical string-pulling tasks with virtually no errors. This has led to various hypotheses being proposed which suggest that birds mentally simulate the effects of their actions on strings. A competing embodied cognition hypothesis proposes that this behaviour is instead modulated by perceptual-motor feedback loops, where feedback of the reward moving closer acts as an internal motivator for functional behaviours, such as pull-stepping. To date, the kea parrot has produced some of the best performances of any bird species at string-pulling tasks. Here, we tested the predictions of the four leading hypotheses for the cognition underpinning bird string-pulling by presenting kea with a horizontal connectivity task where only one of two loose strings was connected to the reward, both before and after receiving perceptual-motor feedback experience. We find that kea fail the connectivity task both before and after perceptual-motor feedback experience, suggesting not only that kea do not mentally simulate their string-pulling actions, but also that perceptual-motor feedback alone is insufficient in eliciting successful performance in the horizontal connectivity task. This suggests a more complex interplay of cognitive factors underlies this iconic example of animal problem-solving.

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