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25th Annual Lecture
Nicola S. Clayton
Professor of Comparative Cognition
Department of Psychology
University of Cambridge
Friday, March 31, 2023
2:00pm
Levin Building Auditorium
425 S. University Avenue, Lower Level
Ways of Thinking: From Crows to Children and Back Again
In this talk I will review some of the recent work on the cognitive capacities of food-caching corvids (birds that are members if the crow family). Research on human developmental cognition suggests that children do not pass similar tests until they are at least four years of age in the case of the social cognition and episodic future planning experiments, and up to eight years of age in the case of the tasks that tap into physical cognition. This developmental trajectory seems surprising~ intuitively, one might have thought that the social and planning tasks required more complex forms of cognitive process, namely Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind. I will present some of our findings on physical cognition in children aged 4 to 11, which may reveal some intriguing clues to address this conundrum. I will also talk about the use of cognitive illusions (magic effects) to reveal blind spots in seeing and roadblocks in seeing, some of which apply to both the jays and to humans., and introduce our latest research on monkey magic and its implications for embodied knowledge. Future research aims to understand the mechanisms underlying these abilities in both humans and corvids, and other animals, thereby exploring similarities and differences in these different and distantly related varieties of mind.