Young domestic chicks spontaneously represent the absence of objects

Author:

Szabó Eszter1ORCID,Chiandetti Cinzia2ORCID,Téglás Ernő1,Versace Elisabetta3ORCID,Csibra Gergely14ORCID,Kovács Ágnes Melinda1ORCID,Vallortigara Giorgio5ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University

2. Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste

3. School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences, Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, Queen Mary University of London

4. Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London

5. Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento

Abstract

Absence is a notion that is usually captured by language-related concepts like zero or negation. Whether nonlinguistic creatures encode similar thoughts is an open question, as everyday behavior marked by absence (of food, of social partners) can be explained solely by expecting presence somewhere else. We investigated 8-day-old chicks’ looking behavior in response to events violating expectations about the presence or absence of an object. We found different behavioral responses to violations of presence and absence, suggesting distinct underlying mechanisms. Importantly, chicks displayed an avian signature of novelty detection to violations of absence, namely a sex-dependent left-eye-bias. Follow-up experiments excluded accounts that would explain this bias by perceptual mismatch or by representing the object at different locations. These results suggest that the ability to spontaneously form representations about the absence of objects likely belongs to the initial cognitive repertoire of vertebrate species.

Funder

European Research Council

PRIN 2017 ERC-SH4-A

Publisher

eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd

Subject

General Immunology and Microbiology,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine,General Neuroscience

Reference53 articles.

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