'Klugheit' bei Vögeln und Primaten:Konsistenz in den kognitiven Leistungen von Raben, Keas und Schimpansen
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
What can individual behavioral differences tell us about the evolution of cognition? In my project, I aimed to present ravens, keas and chimpanzees with an identical large-scale test battery in which they receive a certain number of small-scale tasks in five different domains: temperament, learning, inhibition, inferences and problem solving. With this structural test battery, I aimed to address two big topics: 1) Compare distantly-related bird and primate taxa that are known for their remarkable and apparently similar cognitive abilities. 2) Show consistent individual differences within and between the five domains. This would be an important contribution to the field that could answer longstanding questions about the structure and evolution of cognition. While the chimpanzee data collection in Kenya that was not funded directly by this DFG research fellowship was completed with only minor changes and problems, I encountered major issues during my two years at the University of Vienna and the Haidlhof research station in Austria. In the first year I tried to save the original idea and methodology as long as possible but finally had to concede that the original plan was not suitable for highly neophobic ravens. Most of the ravens did not participate at all as they could not be habituated to the many small-scale tasks they were faced with continuously. Even the four only test subjects that reliably participated had not even completed one third of the tasks by the end of the year despite my best daily efforts. In the second year, we had to react to these issues and change the project drastically. Instead of testing kea in the 2018 breeding season of the ravens, we hand-raised ten raven chicks in a major collaborative effort during this time in order to have access to more reliable test subjects (hand-raised ravens are less neophobic and strongly bond to their human caretakers). The test battery was also reduced significantly from 22 to 13 tasks with the problem solving tasks being removed entirely. This led to five subjects completing the reduced test battery in full with another eight subjects finishing various parts of it. My host in Vienna will continue the data collection in the future so that more detailed results can be expected at a later time. So far only non-statistical descriptive results show few differences in success levels between chimpanzees and ravens, potentially suggesting an intriguing result. While this project failed to answer the original research questions and remains an ongoing data collection at this time, I will continue working on a more complete conclusion.
