Social context hinders humans but not ravens in a short‐term memory task

Social cognition in ravens.

Complex social life has been proposed as one of the main driving forces for the evolution of higher cognitive abilities in humans and non-human animals. Until recently, this theory has been tested mainly on mammals/primates, whereas little attention has been paid to birds. Indeed, birds provide a challenge to the theory, on one hand because they show high flexibility in group formation and comp...

Forgotten but not gone: context effects on recognition do not require explicit memory for context.

Context effects on recognition memory provide an important indirect assay of associative learning and source memory. Neuropsychological studies have indicated that such context effects may obtain even if the contexts themselves are not remembered--for example, in individuals impaired on direct tests of memory for contextual information. In contrast, a recent study indicated that the effects of ...

Long-Term Memory for Affiliates in Ravens

Complex social life requires individuals to recognize and remember group members and, within those, to distinguish affiliates from nonaffiliates. Whereas long-term individual recognition has been demonstrated in some nonhuman animals, memory for the relationship valence to former group members has received little attention. Here we show that adult, pair-housed ravens not only respond differentl...

Video reminders in a representational change task: memory for cues but not beliefs or statements.

Two experiments investigated the effect of video reminders on 3-year-olds' performance in a representational change task. In Experiment 1, children in a video support condition viewed videotapes of their initial incorrect statements about a misleading container prior to being asked to report their initial belief. Children in a control condition viewed an irrelevant videotape. Despite reporting ...

Membrane Research in a Global Context Requires Collaboration, not Competition!