Investigating animal cognition with the Aesop's Fable paradigm: Current understanding and future directions

• Published in: Communicative & integrative biology Vol. 8; no. 4; p. e1035846
• Main Authors: Jelbert, Sarah A, Taylor, Alex H, Gray, Russell D
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Taylor & Francis 01.07.2015; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: causal reasoning; causal understanding; cause-and-effect; children; Cognition; comparative cognition; eurasian jays; Feedback; Folklore; Hypotheses; new caledonian crows; object-bias; perceptual-motor feedback; Reinforcement; rooks; Short Communication; stone-dropping; rooks; object-bias; eurasian jays; comparative cognition; cause-and-effect; children; causal understanding; new caledonian crows; stone-dropping; perceptual-motor feedback; causal reasoning
• ISSN: 1942-0889; 1942-0889
• DOI: 10.1080/19420889.2015.1035846

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.