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Young domestic chicks spontaneously represent the absence of objects
Editors
Title / Series / Name
eLife
Publication Volume
11
Publication Issue
Pages
Editors
Keywords
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/14120
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.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2022
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.7554/elife.67208