Biology subjects

von Bayern, A. M. P.

Publications and source records attributed to von Bayern, A. M. P..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Subadult macaws (Ara glaucogularis) copy better than adults but are less likely to imitate in problem-solving tasks

Copying via imitation (replicating others bodily actions) or emulation (replicating others action goals) underpins the cultural transmission of social norms and technical skills in humans. In this study, we investigated whether blue-throated macaws (Ara glaucogularis) are capable of copying conspecifics using two problem-solving devices: door and plug. The door device could be solved by sliding a panel either UP or DOWN, while the plug device required removing a stopper via either a PUSH or PULL action. A control group (N=5), which received no demonstrations, consistently preferred a single solution for each device-- DOWN for door and PULL for plug. In the subsequent test, adult (N=5) and subadult (N=5) macaws from the test group observed demonstrators (N=2) performing the non-preferred action for each device. Significantly more test birds copied the demonstrated action (UP) for door, but not PUSH for plug, because the subadults were less likely to imitate the PUSH action than the adults. However, the subadults took significantly less time to approach and manipulate the devices than the adults. Overall, our study shows that macaws can copy conspecifics in problem-solving tasks, which facilitates information transfer and transmission of foraging techniques, a prerequisite for foraging culture to arise.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Third-party imitation is not restricted to humans

Imitation of cultural practices is ubiquitous in humans and often involves faithful copying of intransitive (i.e., non-object directed) gestures and societal norms which play a crucial role in human cultural evolution. Apart from learning these directly from a tutor, humans often learn passively as third-party observers from the interactions of two or more individuals. Whether third-party imitation has evolved outside humans remains unknown. In the current study, we investigated whether undomesticated blue-throated macaws could imitate in a third-party setting. A naive test group (N=6) passively observed a conspecific demonstrator performing improbable intransitive actions in response to specific human gestural commands. Directly afterwards, the observer received the same gestural commands and performance-contingent rewards. An equally naive control group (N=5) was tested correspondingly, in the absence of third-party demonstrations. The test group learned more target actions (mean=4.16 versus mean=2.2) in response to the specific commands, significantly faster and performed them more accurately than the control group. The test group also spontaneously imitated some of the actions even before they received any gestural commands or rewards. Our findings show that third-party imitation, even for intransitive actions, exists outside humans, allowing for rapid adaption to group specific behaviours and possibly cultural conventions in parrots.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2024

Awareness of the future: Dolphins know when they need to remember for the future

In humans, awareness of an upcoming memory test enhances intentional encoding and improves memory recall. Here, we investigated whether dolphins exhibit similar future-oriented encoding of information known to be needed in the future. Dolphins were trained to remember specific, randomly assigned actions for later re-enactment, with either immediate or delayed recall. When an unexpected delay was introduced in trials anticipating immediate recall, memory was retained for only 13 seconds, suggesting working memory encoding. However, when instructed to expect delayed recall, dolphins accurately reproduced actions after delays even after 16 hours. These results suggest that dolphins, anticipating future need, intentionally encode actions to be performed in the future into long-term memory, implying prospective encoding and prospective memory capacities. Their memory also displayed key features of episodic memory: encoding occurred in a single episode, and memory was declarative, as the action itself declared its content. Moreover, dolphins more effectively recalled self-performed actions compared to gestural codifications of the same actions, mirroring the human-typical "enactment effect" and supporting episodic-like memory over semantic memory. Our findings indicate that dolphins show awareness of future memory demands and seem to use a future-oriented, episodic-like memory system, capable of storing prospectively encoded, intended actions in long-term memory.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2020

Causal Understanding of the Stone Dropping Task in Two Species of Macaw

Causal understanding in animal cognition can be divided into two broad categories (Woodward, 2011): learned associations between cause and effect (Le Pelley et al., 2017) and understanding based on underlying mechanisms (Johnson and Ahn, 2017). One experiment that gives insight to animals use of causal mechanisms is the stone-dropping task. In this, subjects are given an opportunity to push a platform to make it collapse and are then required to innovate dropping a stone tool to recreate the platform collapsing (von Bayern et al., 2009). We describe how 16/18 subjects of two species of macaw (n=18; Ara ambiguus (n=9) & Ara glaucogularis (n=9)) were able to innovate the solution in this task. Many of the subjects were able to innovate the behaviour through exploratory object combination, but it is also possible that a mechanistic understanding of the necessity for contact with the platform influenced some subjects behaviour. All the successful subjects were able to recreate their novel stone-dropping behaviour in the first or second trial after innovation (and all trials thereafter) and they were also able to do the behaviour increasingly faster. This suggests they also rely on learned associations of cause and effect. However, in a transfer task in which subjects had to guide a stick tool to make it touch a differently positioned platform, all but one of the subjects failed. This would suggest that the majority of the subjects were not using an understanding of platform contact to solve the task, although the subjects difficulty with using stick tools may have also affected their performance in this transfer.

animal behavior and cognition↗