Cognitive Control in Distracted Dinosaurs
(2023) The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour Winter 2023- Abstract
- Cognitive control is a skill used to control one’s own behaviour to reach a goal. We compared this skill across archosaurs by using the distraction task on American alligators, emus, chickens, and common ravens. We investigated whether the animals would still find a food reward hidden behind one of two identical opaque barriers after picking up a food distraction. Results show that all species can find the hidden food reward despite being distracted, but the presence of a distraction impaired the performance of all species except the common raven. All species being from the clade Archosauria, it suggests that cognitive control is a conserved ability which underwent little changes since their last common ancestor, allowing to draw some... (More)
- Cognitive control is a skill used to control one’s own behaviour to reach a goal. We compared this skill across archosaurs by using the distraction task on American alligators, emus, chickens, and common ravens. We investigated whether the animals would still find a food reward hidden behind one of two identical opaque barriers after picking up a food distraction. Results show that all species can find the hidden food reward despite being distracted, but the presence of a distraction impaired the performance of all species except the common raven. All species being from the clade Archosauria, it suggests that cognitive control is a conserved ability which underwent little changes since their last common ancestor, allowing to draw some inferences about extinct related taxa (e.g., non-avian dinosaurs). Moreover, raven’s unflinching performance could be explained by the sharp increase in telencephalic neuron numbers which occurred in the clade Telluraves. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/e3b7c967-54e2-4ee4-bc14-db97ab45b3a5
- author
- Boehly, Thibault LU ; Osvath, Mathias LU and Reber, Stephan A. LU
- organization
- publishing date
- 2023
- type
- Contribution to conference
- publication status
- published
- subject
- keywords
- Cognitive control, Distraction, Birds, Crocodylians, Dinosaurs
- pages
- 1 pages
- conference name
- The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour Winter 2023
- conference location
- Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- conference dates
- 2023-12-13 - 2023-12-14
- project
- The Evolution of Executive Functions in Archosauria
- language
- English
- LU publication?
- yes
- id
- e3b7c967-54e2-4ee4-bc14-db97ab45b3a5
- date added to LUP
- 2024-01-09 13:51:38
- date last changed
- 2024-01-15 10:33:57
@misc{e3b7c967-54e2-4ee4-bc14-db97ab45b3a5, abstract = {{Cognitive control is a skill used to control one’s own behaviour to reach a goal. We compared this skill across archosaurs by using the distraction task on American alligators, emus, chickens, and common ravens. We investigated whether the animals would still find a food reward hidden behind one of two identical opaque barriers after picking up a food distraction. Results show that all species can find the hidden food reward despite being distracted, but the presence of a distraction impaired the performance of all species except the common raven. All species being from the clade Archosauria, it suggests that cognitive control is a conserved ability which underwent little changes since their last common ancestor, allowing to draw some inferences about extinct related taxa (e.g., non-avian dinosaurs). Moreover, raven’s unflinching performance could be explained by the sharp increase in telencephalic neuron numbers which occurred in the clade Telluraves.}}, author = {{Boehly, Thibault and Osvath, Mathias and Reber, Stephan A.}}, keywords = {{Cognitive control; Distraction; Birds; Crocodylians; Dinosaurs}}, language = {{eng}}, title = {{Cognitive Control in Distracted Dinosaurs}}, url = {{https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/files/168727297/23-12-13_ASAB_poster.pdf}}, year = {{2023}}, }