Department of Biology, Western University, 1151 Richmond Street, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 3K7.
Advanced Facility for Avian Research, Western University, 1151 Richmond Street, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 3K7.
Biol Lett. 2021 Dec;17(12):20210504. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2021.0504. Epub 2021 Dec 8.
In the past 20 years, research in animal cognition has challenged the belief that complex cognitive processes are uniquely human. At the forefront of these challenges has been research on mental time travel and future planning in jays. We tested whether Canada jays () demonstrated future planning, using a procedure that has produced evidence of future planning in California scrub-jays. Future planning in this procedure is caching in locations where the bird will predictably experience a lack of food in the future. Canada jays showed no evidence of future planning in this sense and instead cached in the location where food was usually available, opposite to the behaviour described for California scrub-jays. We provide potential explanations for these differing results adding to the recent debates about the role of complex cognition in corvid caching strategies.
在过去的 20 年中，动物认知研究挑战了复杂认知过程是人类独有的这一信念。在这些挑战中处于前沿地位的是关于松鸦的心理时间旅行和未来规划的研究。我们使用一种在加利福尼亚灌丛鸦中产生了未来规划证据的程序来测试加拿大鸦是否表现出了未来规划。在这个程序中，未来规划是在鸟类未来可预测地会缺乏食物的地方进行储存。加拿大鸦在这个意义上没有表现出未来规划的迹象，而是在通常有食物的地方进行储存，与加利福尼亚灌丛鸦的行为描述相反。我们为这些不同的结果提供了潜在的解释，这增加了关于复杂认知在鸦科鸟类储存策略中的作用的最新争论。
