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Enhanced behavioural flexibility has been linked to relatively large brain size and social complexity. Aras exhibit both properties. We tested parrots of A. ambiguus and A. glaucogularis in a serial reversal learning paradigm, in which all the individuals completed an acquisition, and 10 reversal learning phases. Behavioural flexibility (and thus learning performance) was measured as the number of errors per trial. We also conducted social observations on individuals’ social interactions. We found that both species made significantly fewer errors per trial during each reversal phase and over the course of ten reversal phases. All individuals gradually developed a generalised learning strategy i.e., ‘win-stay-loose-shift’, and thus showing ‘learning to learn efficiently’. Our results also support the Social Intelligence Hypothesis whereby individuals’ learning performance was positively related to social interaction. These results show that the two Ara species demonstrate behavioural flexibility, and social complexity provides one explanation for varied individual learning performance.

CogSci 2021

Serial reversal learning using a colour discrimination task in two Ara species

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**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year!<br><br>

**Your Program Chairs,**
![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/99984908caba5e6453e5fc5ba34f3507.jpg)

**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

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To review the proceedings for the conference or review the searchable program, please visit the [website](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/program/).


The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education. The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

poster

This paper studies social interaction in newborns and of various species, whose behavioral developments attributed to the circular sensory motor Stage 3 of behavior development. The article has associated 16 exciting facts of the social behavior in groups of different species, highlighting three questions: (1) how can newborns successfully classify social phenomena that are abstract or absent from their reality; (2) whether emotional contagion can appear through cues of body language that subjects cannot consciously perceive; (3) how do organisms distinguish identical stimuli by their importance (value) without perceptual driver stimuli. The analysis suggests that organisms can interact at initial stages of development by distinguishing cues of a similar modality by their significance (their value). This ability contributes to the assimilation of knowledge about the initial social phenomena. This paper proposes the model of Coherent intelligence, which is strictly based on experimental evidence in modern literature and laws of physics.

Common Origins of Social Interaction of Different Species: The Model of Coherent Intelligence Linking Physics to Social Sciences

Male spotted bowerbirds perform vigorous courtship dances to visiting females on elaborate display arenas. Each arena is built and defended by one dominant male, which commonly tolerates one or more subordinate males. These non-territorial “auxiliary” males are thought to be inexperienced sub-adults. The skills hypothesis suggests that auxiliaries attend established bowers to practice their courtship skills, but little is known about the development of courtship motor performance and which courtship properties are refined with experience. Here we investigate whether auxiliaries are as proficient as bower owners in performing courtship. First, we investigate whether specific courtship moves are used in different contexts within a courtship routine and whether such flexible use of courtship elements is shared both by bower owners and auxiliaries. Second, we examine other fine-scale parameters of courtship dances, in order to further test for possible differences in courtship properties depending on dominance status.

Learning to be attractive: A test of the skills hypothesis in spotted bowerbirds (Ptilonorhynchus maculatus)

Prosociality is considered one of the driving forces for cooperation in human and animal societies. The presence of prosociality in different taxa suggests convergent evolution. To broaden the phylogenetic spectrum in our understanding of prosociality, we examined two parrot species (i.e., African grey parrots (AGP) and blue-headed macaws (BHM)) using a food-sharing paradigm. By controlling the parrots’ hunger level, we tested how satiation may affect their willingness to share food with their most affiliated partner and a less affiliated partner. We also assessed whether they reciprocated if roles were reversed and examined birds’ regurgitation behaviour following the test condition. Preliminary results show that the parrots did not directly transfer any food pieces to their partner. However, food-sharing by regurgitation subsequent to the test situation occurred between the most affiliative partners and more frequently in the AGP than the BHM. This study highlights parrots as a fruitful model for studying prosociality.

Assessing prosocial tendencies of parrots in food sharing situations

This paper reviews the existing literature on categorical perception of sounds and colors in different animals including humans. We highlight that categorical perception is a combination of nature and nurture; to be specific, categorical perception is innate with a phylogenetic root, but it can also be modified by postnatal experience. We also suggest that language is not wholly the basis for categorical perception, as what Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posits; instead, language is one type of experience that can affect the nurture part of categorical perception across domains and modalities in humans.

Categorical Perception as a Combination of Nature and Nurture

The usual approach to studying affordances is in controlled laboratory situations. While recognizing the value of controlled experimentation, I argue for the benefits of additionally considering affordances “in the wild,” i.e., in the context of real-world activity. As an example, I describe ethnographic observation about the introduction of cellphones in rural Uganda in the early 2000s, highlighting the unexpected, innovative uses that emerged in that unique context. This case, I suggest, illustrates the constitutive role of material, sociocultural constraints in the perception and realization of affordances which often go unacknowledged in experimental laboratory research. Theoretically, the case raises questions about the definition of affordances, in particular how narrowly or broadly to conceptualize their spatiotemporal dimensionality. And methodologically, it poses the question of how anthropology can contribute to embodied cognitive science and, more broadly, how experimental and observational approaches can help one another to further our understanding of psychological phenomena.

Affordances in the wild: Anthropological Contributions to Embodied Cognitive Science

Tone combinations with small integer frequency ratios are perceived as pleasant and are referred to as “consonant”. Human consonance preference has been connected to preference for sounds, such as the human voice, that inherently contain consonant intervals via the harmonic series. As such, we might expect other species with harmonic vocalizations to also show attraction to consonance. We tested budgerigars and humans in a place preference test. Subjects could freely spend time with consonant or dissonant versions of a piano melody. Time spent with stimulus types was used as a measure of attraction. Human females spent more time with consonant stimuli but males showed no preference. In budgerigars neither sex showed a preference. This did not change when repeating the experiment with consonant and dissonant versions of budgerigar sounds. The amount of nonlinearity in budgerigar vocalizations can explain these results engendering relevant implications for future cross-species consonance studies.

No evidence for attraction to consonance in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) from a place preference paradigm

Although orangutans are closely related to humans, very little is known about their ontogenetic development. In particular, there is a lack of systematic research on the maternal behaviors that mediate skill development in early infancy. To address this topic, we conducted a longitudinal study in which a Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) mother-infant dyad was systematically observed across 28 months, starting with the infant’s birth. Our data revealed several classes of maternal behavior that potentially influenced infant skill development. The timing of these behaviors was contingent upon infant competence level, as active interventions were intense during periods of skill acquisition. The same behaviors were flexibly deployed independent of whether the infant was in the process of acquiring foraging, locomotor or social skills. Our findings suggest that the maternal behaviors that mediate infant skill development in Sumatran orangutans have features reminiscent of human scaffolding, and raise questions about intentionality in such behaviors.

Maternal behaviors that mediate skill development in Sumatran orangutans

Humans are ultra-social: they spontaneously incorporate others’ mental states into their action-planning (Kaminski et al.,2008), and altercentric: their behavior is influenced by others’ perspectives, even perspectives irrelevant to their instrumental goal (Kampis & Southgate, 2020). Recent evidence suggests that similarly to human infants, non-human great apes anticipate others’ actions based on their beliefs (Krupenye et al.,2016; Kano et al, 2019); raising the critical question whether altercentrism is uniquely human. 
In two experiments, we tested chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans in a manual search paradigm adapted from Mendes et al. (2008). These experiments replicated findings demonstrating apes’ first-person object-tracking abilities. Experiment 1 found no evidence for altercentrism: apes’ search behavior was not spontaneously modulated by another agent’s beliefs (unlike 14-month-old human infants; Kampis & Kovács, 2020). Experiment 2 found tentative evidence that apes inferred a person’s actions based on her beliefs, and adapted their own actions based on this information.

Great apes’ understanding of others’ beliefs in two manual search tasks

What is the extent to which learned communication signals are a product of biological evolution? Songbirds are a good candidate group for studying this question, since songbird species show remarkable similarities but also a large variability in their vocalizations, with many examples of cultural transmission. To this end, in a large sample of songbird species and other birds that do not learn their songs, we analyzed whether evolutionary relations estimated from molecular genetics can predict acoustic similarity between songs. We assessed birdsong similarity with various acoustic features extracted by signal processing methods. Surprisingly, we found that the extent to which learned songs reflect genetic relations is comparable to - if not exceeding - innate vocalizations. These findings suggest that even in communication signals that are largely determined by cultural transmission (eg: human language), evolutionary constraints could manifest, as famously suggested by Chomsky in his theory of universal grammar.

Evolutionary influences in learned bird communication signals

Humans are uniquely impressive cooperators, and yet it remains unclear exactly which cognitive and motivational mechanisms set human cooperation apart. Our closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, have also demonstrated a range of prosocial tendencies across experimental and observational contexts. Critically, however, we do not yet know whether their helping behavior, like that of humans, is motivated by an acute sensitivity to others’ needs. We investigated this question in a novel eye-tracking task, with a large sample of captive apes. While their gaze and pupils were tracked, apes viewed controlled videos of an agent reaching toward objects that ultimately would or would not be attainable without help. If apes are acutely sensitive to others’ needs, we predicted that they would show greater pupil dilation (arousal) when the agent could not complete a goal on his own. Our findings shed light on the mechanistic and evolutionary bases of human prosociality and empathy.

Serial reversal learning using a colour discrimination task in two Ara species

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Common Origins of Social Interaction of Different Species: The Model of Coherent Intelligence Linking Physics to Social Sciences

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