Are Goffin’s cockatoos capable of transferring a tool-use skill acquired in a certain situation to a new contextual setting on which they have no previous experience? In our study, performance of thirteen adult subjects (divided into two groups: experimental or control) was compared in a two-stage experiment where the learning component about the tool was manipulated by providing a more diverse training for the experimental group in stage one. We hypothesized that this broader learning of the tool's affordances would enable to transfer its use to solve a novel task. Our results show that the experimental group outperformed the control group in stage two (higher success rate and faster learning speed), which we interpret as a product of behavioural flexibility being enhanced during stage one: by operating the tool in more diverse contexts, these individuals might have acquired an advantageous experience, transferrable to tackle an untrained problem more efficiently.

Knowledge transfer for tool use in the Goffin's cockatoo

Paying attention to weight is important when deciding upon an object’s efficacy or value in various contexts (e.g. tool use, foraging). Proprioceptive discrimination learning, with objects that differ only in weight, has so far been investigated in a handful of primate species. Here we show that while Goffin’s cockatoos learn faster when additional colour cues are used, they can also quickly learn to discriminate between objects on the basis of their weight alone. Ultimately, the birds learned to discriminate between visually identical objects on the basis of weight much faster than primates, although methodological differences between tasks should be considered.

Goffin's cockatoos learn to discriminate objects based on weight alone in an object choice task


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Poster Session 1 -  B: Animal Cognition and Communication

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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.

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CogSci 2021

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.

**Session Chair: **John Michael 
**Technical Session Chair: **Emmy Liu 
**Session Description: ** The session is comprised of 15 minute talks followed by up to 5 minutes of live Q&A time for each presenter.

Alice Auersperg

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Presentations

Knowledge transfer for tool use in the Goffin's cockatoo

Goffin's cockatoos learn to discriminate objects based on weight alone in an object choice task

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