How You Play May Assess Cognitive Abilities and Underpinnings

The way you play may say a bit about you. Scientists have found that the way in which toys are handled and combined with one another during object play can tell them a lot about the cognitive underpinnings of the species playing with them.

Playing with toys usually is a precursor to tool use. In fact, human children start bashing two objects together when they are about eight months old, and at 10 months they combine toys with elements from their environment. Birds also show "play" behaviors, which is why scientists decided to examine parrots and crows in this latest study.

In this case, the researchers gave three crow species and nine parrot species identical sets of wooden toddler toys of different shape and color categories. They also gave the birds a "playground," which had various tubes and holes for insertions and poles for stacking rings.

So what did they find? It turns out that while animals of most species interacted with the toys, complex object-object combinations were limited to a subset of the species. The frequency of object-object combinations was highest in New Caledonian crows and in Goffin cockatoos, Black Palm cockatoos and Kea. New Caledonian crows and Goffin cockatoos performed the best, and even combined up to three toys.

"New Caledonian crows are innate tool users and also the only crow known to regularly use and manufacture different types of foraging tools in the wild," said Alice Auersperg, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The Black Palm cockatoos are also habitual tool users, with the males using wooden logs and drum sticks to attract their females to potential breeding sites and to deter competitors. The Goffin cockatoo as well as the Kea, although not innate tool users, have both repeatedly demonstrated the capacity for innovative and flexible tool use as well as high-level performances in problem solving tasks involving object manipulations in captivity."

The findings reveal that play may also herald tool use in animals. More specifically, it implies that some abilities substrates in birds and primates may have evolved convergently.

The findings are published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).