The Innovation Arena: A Method for Comparing Innovative Problem-Solving Across Groups

Problem-solving tasks are commonly used to investigate technical, innovative behavior but a comparison of this ability across a broad range of species is ...

University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, University of Vienna, Medical University of Vienna

The combination of highly controlled experimental testing and the voluntary participation of unrestrained animals has many advantages over traditional, laboratory-based learning environments in terms of animal welfare, learning speed, and resource economy. Such automatic learning environments have recently been developed for primates (Fagot & Bonté, 2010; Fagot & Paleressompoulle, 2009;) but, so far, has not been achieved with highly mobile creatures such as birds. Here, we present a novel testing environment for pigeons. Living together in small groups in outside aviaries, they can freely choose to participate in learning experiments by entering and leaving the automatic learning box at any time. At the single-access entry, they are individualized using radio frequency identification technology and then trained or tested in a stress-free and self-terminating manner. The voluntary nature of their participation according to their individual biorhythm guarantees high motivation levels and good learning and test performance. Around-the-clock access allows for massed-trials training, which in baboons has been proven to have facilitative effects on discrimination learning. The performance of 2 pigeons confirmed the advantages of the automatic learning device for birds box. The latter is the result of a development process of several years that required us to deal with and overcome a number of technical challenges: (1) mechanically controlled access to the box, (2) identification of the birds, (3) the release of a bird and, at the same time, prevention of others from entering the box, and (4) reliable functioning of the device despite long operation times and exposure to high dust loads and low temperatures. 

The ALDB box: automatic testing of cognitive performance in groups of aviary-housed pigeons.

In recent years red-footed tortoises have been shown to be proficient in a number of spatial cognition tasks that involve movement of the animal through space (e.g., the radial maze). The present study investigated the ability of the tortoise to learn a spatial task in which the response required was simply to touch a stimulus presented in a given position on a touchscreen. We also investigated the relation between this task and performance in a different spatial task (an arena, in which whole-body movement was required). Four red-footed tortoises learned to operate the touchscreen apparatus, and two learned the simple spatial discrimination. The side-preference trained with the touchscreen was maintained when behaviour was tested in a physical arena. When the contingencies in the arena were then reversed, the tortoises learned the reversal but in a subsequent test did not transfer it to the touchscreen. Rather they chose the side that had been rewarded originally on the touchscreen. The results show that red-footed tortoises are able to operate a touchscreen and can successfully solve a spatial two-choice task in this apparatus. There was some indication that the preference established with the touchscreen could transfer to an arena, but with subsequent training in the arena independent patterns of choice were established that could be evoked according to the test context.

Touchscreen performance and knowledge transfer in the red-footed tortoise (Chelonoidis carbonaria).

The question of whether animals have emotions and respond to the emotional expressions of others has become a focus of research in the last decade [1-9]. However, to date, no study has convincingly shown that animals discriminate between emotional expressions of heterospecifics, excluding the possibility that they respond to simple cues. Here, we show that dogs use the emotion of a heterospecific as a discriminative cue. After learning to discriminate between happy and angry human faces in 15 picture pairs, whereby for one group only the upper halves of the faces were shown and for the other group only the lower halves of the faces were shown, dogs were tested with four types of probe trials: (1) the same half of the faces as in the training but of novel faces, (2) the other half of the faces used in training, (3) the other half of novel faces, and (4) the left half of the faces used in training. We found that dogs for which the happy faces were rewarded learned the discrimination more quickly than dogs for which the angry faces were rewarded. This would be predicted if the dogs recognized an angry face as an aversive stimulus. Furthermore, the dogs performed significantly above chance level in all four probe conditions and thus transferred the training contingency to novel stimuli that shared with the training set only the emotional expression as a distinguishing feature. We conclude that the dogs used their memories of real emotional human faces to accomplish the discrimination task.

Dogs can discriminate emotional expressions of human faces.

Recent pioneering work has shown the great promise that scanning awake, nonsedated dogs holds for both understanding the canine and the human brain and mind. A number of technological and methodological challenges, however, still need to be overcome to fully tap this potential.

Understanding dog cognition by functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Currently, there is still no consensus about whether animals can ascribe mental states (Theory of Mind) to themselves and others. Showing animals can respond to cues that indicate whether another has visual access to a target or not, and that they are able to use this information as a basis for whom to rely on as an informant, is an important step forward in this direction. Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) with human informants are an ideal model, because they show high sensitivity towards human eye contact, they have proven able to assess the attentional state of humans in food-stealing or food-begging contexts, and they follow human gaze behind a barrier when searching for food. With 16 dogs, we not only replicated the main results of Maginnity and Grace (Anim Cogn 17(6):1375-1392, 2014) who recently found that dogs preferred to follow the pointing of a human who witnessed a food hiding event over a human who did not (the Guesser-Knower task), but also extended this finding with a further, critical control for behaviour-reading: two informants showed identical looking behaviour, but due to their different position in the room, only one had the opportunity to see where the food was hidden by a third person. Preference for the Knower in this critical test provides solid evidence for geometrical gaze following and perspective taking in dogs.

Dogs demonstrate perspective taking based on geometrical gaze following in a Guesser-Knower task.

Companion dogs learn easily from humans, including human behavior, human communication, and some aspects of the human-made environment. They benefit from having the opportunity to learn from humans and are able to spontaneously synchronize their behavior with that of their caregiver. Here, we tested whether pet dogs would show a special form of observational learning, one that has been considered uniquely human. Indeed, humans show overimitation, the faithful copying of causally irrelevant actions, but great apes do not. Because in humans this peculiar form of imitation is strongly motivated by social factors, such as affiliation or conformity, we hypothesized that domesticated and enculturated dogs are more likely than apes are to copy such actions, especially if shown by their affiliated caregiver. Indeed, half of the dogs replicated a causally irrelevant action that was demonstrated by their caregiver, and about the same number did this whether they saw only this action being demonstrated or being demonstrated before or after a causally relevant, functional action. The demonstration of a causally relevant action, one that is immediately followed by access to food, thus does not inhibit the copying of an action that is spatially separated and functionally opaque. Given that the copying frequency in this study was low overall, these results suggest evidence for overimitation in dogs, which might challenge the human uniqueness of this type of social learning.

Would dogs copy irrelevant actions from their human caregiver?

Canine cognition.

Dogs have not only shown different kinds of social learning, from either conspecifics or humans, including do-as-I-do imitation, deferred imitation, and selective imitation, but in two previous studies they have also shown an eagerness to copy causally irrelevant actions. This so-called overimitation is prevalent in humans but is totally absent in great apes. Whereas in one of two previous studies dogs copied actions from an experimenter (Johnston, Holden, & Santos in Developmental Science, 20, e12460, 2017), in the other a reasonable number of the dogs copied the irrelevant actions from their human caregiver (Huber, Popovová, Riener, Salobir, & Cimarelli in Learning & Behavior, 46, 387-397, 2018). Dogs have not only been domesticated to live and work with us, but many companion dogs develop strong affiliative relationships with their caregiver, which are akin to the attachment bonds between human children and their mother. We therefore assumed that overimitation in dogs might be strongly motivated by social factors, such as affiliation or conformity. To test this hypothesis, we confronted dogs with the same demonstration of causally relevant and irrelevant actions as in the previous study (Huber et al. in Learning & Behavior, 46, 387-397, 2018), but this time with an unfamiliar experimenter instead of the caregiver as the demonstrator. The results strongly supported our hypothesis: Whereas half of the subjects in the previous study replicated the causally irrelevant action demonstrated by their caregiver, only very few did so when the actions were demonstrated by the experimenter. We conclude that the eagerness of dogs to learn from humans and to copy even unnecessary actions is strongly facilitated by their relationship with the particular human.

Ludwig Huber

Comparative Cognition,
Messerli Research Institute,
Comparative Cognition, Messerli Research Institute

University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, University of Vienna, Medical University of Vienna

The Innovation Arena: A Method for Comparing Innovative Problem-Solving Across Groups

Ludwig Huber

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University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, University of Vienna, Medical University of Vienna

The Innovation Arena: A Method for Comparing Innovative Problem-Solving Across Groups

Comparative Cognition,
Messerli Research Institute,
Comparative Cognition, Messerli Research Institute