Ratcheting up tool innovation in Goffin's cockatoos (Cacatua goffiniana): The effect of contextually diverse prior experience.

ABSTRACT: The ability to gain information from one situation, acquire new skills and/or perfect existing ones, and subsequently apply them to a new situation is a key element in behavioural flexibility and a hallmark of innovation. A flexible agent is expected to store these skills and apply them to contexts different from that in which learning occurred. Goffin's cockatoos (Cacatua goffiniana) are highly innovative parrots renowned for their problem-solving and tool-using skills and are thus excellent candidates to study this phenomenon. We hypothesized that birds allowed to use a tool in a larger variety of contingencies would acquire a broader expertise in handling it, facilitating its transfer to new tasks. In our study, we compared the performance of two groups of captive Goffin's cockat

SUBMITTER: Ibanez de Aldecoa P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10108129 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature