Tool Manufacture in the Goffin´s cockatoo

Creative and flexible tool manufacture that appeared from innovation rather than from inflexible, inborn behavioural patterns can be highly telling when studying goal-directed abilities in animals. Furthermore, studying the capacity for such flexible tool manufacture in species distantly related from primates can reveal different origins and cognitive strategies behind tool making. Nevertheless, outside primates, it can be difficult to identify such events, as these are extremely rare, often anecdotal and usually hard to fully segregate from inherited behavioural routines. Although an example was previously described in two crow species, we cannot fully account for the effect of possible predispositions to reshape objects deriving from nest building and/or food caching. We therefore suggest study the origins and progress of tool manufacture in a bird lacking such tendencies. The Goffin cockatoo, a parrot which is not a nest builder and not dependant on tool obtained food has previously shown advanced performances in various highly different problem solving tasks, including examples of innovative tool making. We plan to confront our subjects with set of controlled problem solving experiments featuring different foraging problems and different materials for making tools: After verifying that the cognitive mechanism underlying different types of tools manufactured by this species is not simply the copying known tools, we propose to use a set of three tasks to study the animals` flexibility and goal directedness as well as the appreciation of functionality when making a tool in order to determine to what extent their performance meets the criteria for flexible, `intelligent` tool manufacture. Finally we would like to analyse cost evaluation involved in manufactured tools by looking at tool `safekeeping`. The proposed study will help us to understand how events of innovative tool manufacture can originate outside primates and ultimately widen our scope and enhance our knowledge on the role of innovation in the formation of tool related abilities. .

In January 2020 the FWF-funded project 'Innovative Tool Manufacture in the Goffin's cockatoo' was completed. The project that produced a total of 15 research articles addressed the unusual, primate-like ability of a parrot, the Goffin's cockatoo to manufacture objects into tools. The team around cognitive biologist Alice Auersperg from the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna found that without training, the cockatoos could make a stick-like tool for probing from up to three out of four different materials: They succeeded to shape sticks by breaking splinters out blocks of wood, by removing leaves and side-branches from twigs and by placing a distinct row of parallel bitemarks alongside the edge of a block of cardboard before curving out a stripe of the appropriate length. The researchers thereafter offered the animals further blocks of cardboard to test if they were able to adjust the lengths of the stripes they made to the varying distance of an out-of-reach food reward. They were able to show that the birds made longer tools when the distance from the probing hole to the food reward was far versus close. Moreover, the animals rarely tried to insert stripes into the probing hole that were too short and discarded them as soon as they approached the task. This may thus suggest an ability to flexibly reduce effort during tool making. Moreover, other tests suggested that orangutans as well as Goffins both seem to have at least the capacity to make two different types of tool (a hooked tool out of a straight piece of pipecleaner and a straight tool out of a bent piece of pipecleaner) from the same material. Nevertheless, orangutans were faster than Goffins at solving both tasks by using both, their hands and mouths in coordinated action. The evidence further indicates that Goffins actively adjust the color and the relative length of a memorized template when creating a cutout stripe out of a larger block of material without the template being in the animals' sight. Finally, Goffins were shown to not only hold on to tools that have proved useful before but they seem to be optimizing their effort by holding on to previously used tools more often in a situation in which the loss of a tool is costlier. In summary, the Goffin meets the criteria for flexible, 'intelligent' tool manufacture on several levels. As the projects succeeds in showing how flexible tool manufacture can emerge in this non-specialized non-primate, the findings of this project contribute to the existing evidence highlighting the role of general intelligence in the development of tool manufacture.