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      How Insightful Is ‘Insight’? New Caledonian Crows Do Not Attend to Object Weight during Spontaneous Stone Dropping

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          Abstract

          It is highly difficult to pinpoint what is going through an animal’s mind when it appears to solve a problem by ‘insight’. Here, we searched for an information processing error during the emergence of seemingly insightful stone dropping in New Caledonian crows. We presented these birds with the platform apparatus, where a heavy object needs to be dropped down a tube and onto a platform in order to trigger the release of food. Our results show New Caledonian crows exhibit a weight inattention error: they do not attend to the weight of an object when innovating stone dropping. This suggests that these crows do not use an understanding of force when solving the platform task in a seemingly insightful manner. Our findings showcase the power of the signature-testing approach, where experiments search for information processing biases, errors and limits, in order to make strong inferences about the functioning of animal minds.

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          Most cited references22

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          Insightful problem solving and creative tool modification by captive nontool-using rooks.

          The ability to use tools has been suggested to indicate advanced physical cognition in animals. Here we show that rooks, a member of the corvid family that do not appear to use tools in the wild are capable of insightful problem solving related to sophisticated tool use, including spontaneously modifying and using a variety of tools, shaping hooks out of wire, and using a series of tools in a sequence to gain a reward. It is remarkable that a species that does not use tools in the wild appears to possess an understanding of tools rivaling habitual tool users such as New Caledonian crows and chimpanzees. Our findings suggest that the ability to represent tools may be a domain-general cognitive capacity rather than an adaptive specialization and questions the relationship between physical intelligence and wild tool use.
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            Clever animals and killjoy explanations in comparative psychology.

            From the process of organic evolution to the analysis of insect societies as self-organizing systems, biology is full of awe-inspiring examples of complexity arising from simplicity. Yet in the contemporary study of animal cognition, demonstrations that complex human-like behavior arises from simple mechanisms rather than from 'higher' processes, such as insight or theory of mind, are often seen as uninteresting and 'killjoy', almost a denial of mental continuity between other species and humans. At the same time, however, research elsewhere in psychology increasingly reveals an unexpected role in human behavior for simple, unconscious and sometimes irrational processes shared by other animals. Greater appreciation of such mechanisms in nonhuman species would contribute to a deeper, more truly comparative psychology. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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              Animal tool-use.

              The sight of an animal making and using a tool captivates scientists and laymen alike, perhaps because it forces us to question some of our ideas about human uniqueness. Does the animal know how the tool works? Did it anticipate the need for the tool and make it in advance? To some, this fascination with tools seems arbitrary and anthropocentric; after all, animals engage in many other complex activities, like nest building, and we know that complex behaviour need not be cognitively demanding. But tool-using behaviour can also provide a powerful window into the minds of living animals, and help us to learn what capacities we share with them - and what might have changed to allow for the incontrovertibly unique levels of technology shown by modern humans. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                14 December 2016
                2016
                : 11
                : 12
                : e0167419
                Affiliations
                [1 ]School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
                [2 ]Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
                [3 ]School of Biology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, United Kingdom
                [4 ]Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jenna, Germany
                Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, ITALY
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                • Conceptualization: AHT.

                • Formal analysis: AHT PDN.

                • Funding acquisition: AHT.

                • Investigation: AHT PDN SAJ MS AJB.

                • Methodology: AHT.

                • Resources: AHT.

                • Supervision: AHT.

                • Writing – original draft: AHT PDN SAJ MS AJB.

                • Writing – review & editing: AHT PDN SAJ MS AJB.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8880-8674
                Article
                PONE-D-16-24957
                10.1371/journal.pone.0167419
                5156351
                27973610
                65176d0a-8415-44f1-b53c-44a4411b1871
                © 2016 Neilands et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 21 June 2016
                : 14 November 2016
                Page count
                Figures: 2, Tables: 3, Pages: 12
                Funding
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001509, Royal Society of New Zealand;
                Award ID: Rutherford Discovery Fellowship
                Award Recipient :
                Work was funded by a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand (AHT). SAJ would like to thank the ERC for funding. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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