- 1School of Psychology; University of Auckland ; Auckland, New Zealand.
Abstract
The Aesop's Fable
paradigm - in which subjects drop stones into tubes of water to obtain
floating out-of-reach rewards - has been used to assess causal
understanding in rooks, crows, jays and human children. To date, the
performance of corvids suggests that they can recognize the functional
properties of a variety of objects including size, weight and solidity,
and they seem to be more capable of learning from causal information
than arbitrary information. However, 2 alternative explanations for
their performance have yet to be ruled out. The perceptual-motor
feedback hypothesis suggests that subjects may attend solely to the
movement of the reward, repeating actions which bring the reward closer,
while the object-bias hypothesis suggests that subjects could pass
certain tasks by preferring to handle objects that resemble natural
stones. Here we review our current understanding of performance on the Aesop's Fable
tasks, and suggest that studies controlling for feedback and object
preferences will help us determine exactly what animals understand about
the cause and effect of water displacement.
KEYWORDS:
causal
reasoning; causal understanding; cause-and-effect; children;
comparative cognition; eurasian jays; new caledonian crows; object-bias;
perceptual-motor feedback; rooks; stone-dropping
