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Bovet, D., Vauclair, J., & Blaye, A. (2005). Categorization and abstraction abilities in 3-year-old children: a comparison with monkey data. Anim. Cogn., 8(1), 53–59.
Abstract: Three-year-old children were tested on three categorization tasks of increasing levels of abstraction (used with adult baboons in an earlier study): the first was a conceptual categorization task (food vs toys), the second a perceptual matching task (same vs different objects), and the third a relational matching task in which the children had to sort pairs according to whether or not the two items belonged to the same or different categories. The children were tested using two different procedures, the first a replication of the procedure used with the baboons (pulling one rope for a category or a relationship between two objects, and another rope for the other category or relationship), the second a task based upon children's prior experiences with sorting objects (putting in the same box objects belonging to the same category or a pair of objects exemplifying the same relation). The children were able to solve the first task (conceptual categorization) when tested with the sorting into boxes procedure, and the second task (perceptual matching) when tested with both procedures. The children were able to master the third task (relational matching) only when the rules were clearly explained to them, but not when they could only watch sorting examples. In fact, the relational matching task without explanation requires analogy abilities that do not seem to be fully developed at 3 years of age. The discrepancies in performances between children tested with the two procedures, with the task explained or not, and the discrepancies observed between children and baboons are discussed in relation to differences between species and/or problem-solving strategies.
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Giret, N., Miklósi, Á., Kreutzer, M., & Bovet, D. (2009). Use of experimenter-given cues by African gray parrots ( Psittacus erithacus ). Anim. Cogn., 12(1), 1–10.
Abstract: Abstract: One advantage of living in a social group is the opportunity to use information provided by other individuals. Social information can be based on cues provided by a conspecific or even by a heterospecific individual (e.g., gaze direction, vocalizations, pointing gestures). Although the use of human gaze and gestures has been extensively studied in primates, and is increasingly studied in other mammals, there is no documentation of birds using these cues in a cooperative context. In this study, we tested the ability of three African gray parrots to use different human cues (pointing and/or gazing) in an object-choice task. We found that one subject spontaneously used the most salient pointing gesture (looking and steady pointing with hand at about 20 cm from the baited box). The two others were also able to use this cue after 15 trials. None of the parrots spontaneously used the steady gaze cues (combined head and eye orientation), but one learned to do so effectively after only 15 trials when the distance between the head and the baited box was about 1 m. However, none of the parrots were able to use the momentary pointing nor the distal pointing and gazing cues. These results are discussed in terms of sensitivity to joint attention as a prerequisite to understand pointing gestures as it is to the referential use of labels.
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Vick, S. - J., Bovet, D., & Anderson, J. (2001). Gaze discrimination learning in olive baboons (Papio anubis). Anim. Cogn., 4(1), 1–10.
Abstract: The ability to discriminate between pairs of photographs according to the portrayed model's visual attention status was examined in four olive baboons. Two baboons successfully managed to solve the problem, even when attention was demonstrated by eye direction alone. A third showed an ability to discriminate head direction but not eye direction. In order to investigate further their ability to discriminate attention, the two successful baboons and two naïve baboons were presented with a simple object-choice task accompanied by experimenter-given cues. There was no evidence of transfer from the photographic stimuli to a real model; only one baboon showed signs of using the experimenter's attention to chose between two objects, and only after over 300 trials. These results could suggest that the baboons used simple physical cues rather than a concept of attention to solve the picture discrimination but alternative explanations are also discussed.
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