Jackie Chappell - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Jackie Chappell

One important element of complex and flexible tool use, particularly where tool manufacture is in... more One important element of complex and flexible tool use, particularly where tool manufacture is involved, is the ability to select or manufacture appropriate tools anticipating the needs of any given task -an ability that has been rarely tested in non-primates. We examine aspects of this ability in New Caledonian crows -a species known to be extraordinary tool users and manufacturers. In a 2002 study, Chappell and Kacelnik showed that these crows were able to select a tool of the appropriate length for a task among a set of different lengths, and in 2002, Weir, Chappell and Kacelnik showed that New Caledonian crows were able to shape unfamiliar materials to create a usable tool for a specific task. Here we examine their handling of tool diameter. In experiment 1, we show that when facing three loose sticks that were usable as tools, they preferred the thinnest one. When the three sticks were presented so that one was loose and the other two in a bundle, they only disassembled the bundle when their preferred tool was tied. In experiment 2, we show that they manufacture, and modify during use, a tool of a suitable diameter from a tree branch, according to the diameter of the hole through which the tool will have to be inserted. These results add to the developing picture of New Caledonian crows as sophisticated tool users and manufacturers, having an advanced level of folk physics. Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at http:// dx.

PLOS ONE, 2015

For orangutans, the largest predominantly arboreal primates, discontinuous canopy presents a part... more For orangutans, the largest predominantly arboreal primates, discontinuous canopy presents a particular challenge. The shortest gaps between trees lie between thin peripheral branches, which offer the least stability to large animals. The affordances of the forest canopy experienced by orangutans of different ages however, must vary substantially as adult males are an order of magnitude larger in size than infants during the early stages of locomotor independence. Orangutans have developed a diverse range of locomotor behaviour to cross gaps between trees, which vary in their physical and cognitive demands. The aims of this study were to examine the ontogeny of orangutan gap crossing behaviours and to determine which factors influence the distance orangutans crossed. A non-invasive photographic technique was used to quantify forearm length as a measure of body size. We also recorded locomotor behaviour, support use and the distance crossed between trees. Our results suggest that gap crossing varies with both physical and cognitive development. More complex locomotor behaviours, which utilized compliant trunks and lianas, were used to cross the largest gaps, but these peaked in frequency much earlier than expected, between the ages of 4 and 5 years old, which probably reflects play behaviour to perfect locomotor techniques. Smaller individuals also crossed disproportionately large gaps relative to their size, by using support deformation. Our results suggest that orangutans acquire the full repertoire of gap crossing techniques, including the more cognitively demanding ones, before weaning, but adjust the frequency of the use of these techniques to their increasing body size.

Journal of experimental child psychology, 2014

Currently, there are relatively few tasks suitable for testing planned problem solving in childre... more Currently, there are relatively few tasks suitable for testing planned problem solving in children. We presented 4- to 10-year-old children (N=172) with two planning tasks (sequential planning and advance planning) using the paddle-box apparatus, which was originally designed to investigate the planning skills of nonhuman apes. First, we were interested in the development of children's performance in the two tasks and whether the strategies children used to succeed differed among age groups. Performance improved significantly across age groups in both tasks. Strategies for success in the advance planning task differed among age groups, with 4- and 5-year-olds performing more excess actions, and a greater proportion of irrelevant excess actions, than older children. Findings are discussed in relation to the development of performance in tower tasks, which are a commonly used test of planning ability in humans. Second, based on previous findings with apes, we predicted that introd...

Frontiers in psychology, 2014

In three studies, we explored the retention and transfer of tool-making knowledge, learnt from an... more In three studies, we explored the retention and transfer of tool-making knowledge, learnt from an adult demonstration, to other temporal and task contexts. All studies used a variation of a task in which children had to make a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tall transparent tube. Children who failed to innovate the hook tool independently saw a demonstration. In Study 1, we tested children aged 4-6 years (N = 53) who had seen the original demonstration 3 months earlier. Performance was excellent at the second time, indicating that children's knowledge was retained over the 3 month period. In Studies 2 and 3 we explored transfer of the new knowledge to other tasks. In Study 2, children were given two variants of the apparatus that differed in surface characteristics (e.g., shape and color). Participants generalized their knowledge to these new apparatuses even though the new pipecleaner also differed in size and color. Five- to 6-year-olds (N = 22) almost always transferre...

This article examines two issues: the role of gesture in the communication of spatial information... more This article examines two issues: the role of gesture in the communication of spatial information and the relation between communication and mental representation. Children (8-10 years) and adults walked through a space to learn the locations of six hidden toy animals and then explained the space to another person. In Study 1, older children and adults typically gestured when describing the space and rarely provided spatial information in speech without also providing the information in gesture. However, few 8-yearolds communicated spatial information in speech or gesture. Studies 2 and 3 showed that 8-year-olds did understand the spatial arrangement of the animals and could communicate spatial information if prompted to use their hands. Taken together, these results indicate that gesture is important for conveying spatial relations at all ages and, as such, provides us with a more complete picture of what children do and do not know about communicating spatial relations.

Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, 2013

Comparative CognitionExperimental Explorations of Animal Intelligence, 2009

... Caledonian Crows Alex Kacelnik, Jackie Chappell, Ben Kenward & Alex AS Weir ... “The firs... more ... Caledonian Crows Alex Kacelnik, Jackie Chappell, Ben Kenward & Alex AS Weir ... “The first indications that our ancestors were in any respect unusual among animals were our extremely crude stone tools that began to appear in Africa by around two-and-a-half million years ...

Proceedings of the Royal …, 1995

... use the sun compass rather than fixed directional visual cues in an open-field arena food-searc... more ... use the sun compass rather than fixed directional visual cues in an open-field arena food-searching task JACKIE CHAPPELL AND ... However, denial of visual landmark cues slows homing from familiar but not unfamiliar sites (Braithwaite & Guilford 1991, 1994; Braithwaite 1993 ...

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2011

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2004

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 1996

... TIM GUILFORD AND JACKIE CHAPPELL ... several kinds of information (including song types, diet... more ... TIM GUILFORD AND JACKIE CHAPPELL ... several kinds of information (including song types, dietary preferences, and foraging skills) either directly from, or more effectively in the presence of, experienced conspecifics (for reviews see Galef 1988, 1993; Heyes 1993; Nicol 1995 ...

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2012

Do we fully understand the structure of the problems we present to our subjects in experiments on... more Do we fully understand the structure of the problems we present to our subjects in experiments on animal cognition, and the information required to solve them? While we currently have a good understanding of the behavioural and neurobiological mechanisms underlying associative learning processes, we understand much less about the mechanisms underlying more complex forms of cognition in animals. In this study, we present a proposal for a new way of thinking about animal cognition experiments. We describe a process in which a physical cognition task domain can be decomposed into its component parts, and models constructed to represent both the causal events of the domain and the information available to the agent. We then implement a simple set of models, using the planning language MAPL within the MAPSIM simulation environment, and applying it to a puzzle tube task previously presented to orangutans. We discuss the results of the models and compare them with the results from the experiments with orangutans, describing the advantages of this approach, and the ways in which it could be extended.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2013

We know that even young children are proficient tool users, but until recently, little was known ... more We know that even young children are proficient tool users, but until recently, little was known about how they make tools. Here, we will explore the concepts underlying tool making, and the kinds of information and putative cognitive abilities required for children to manufacture novel tools. We will review the evidence for novel tool manufacture from the comparative literature and present a growing body of data from children suggesting that innovation of the solution to a problem by making a tool is a much more challenging task than previously thought. Children's difficulty with these kinds of tasks does not seem to be explained by perseveration with unmodified tools, difficulty with switching to alternative strategies, task pragmatics or issues with permission. Rather, making novel tools (without having seen an example of the required tool within the context of the task) appears to be hard, because it is an example of an 'ill-structured problem'. In this type of ill-structured problem, the starting conditions and end goal are known, but the transformations and/or actions required to get from one to the other are not specified. We will discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the development of problem-solving in humans and other animals.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2014

Tool innovation-designing and making novel tools to solve tasksis extremely difficult for young c... more Tool innovation-designing and making novel tools to solve tasksis extremely difficult for young children. To discover why this might be, we highlighted different aspects of tool making to children aged 4 to 6 years (N = 110). Older children successfully innovated the means to make a hook after seeing the pre-made target tool only if they had a chance to manipulate the materials during a warm-up. Older children who had not manipulated the materials and all younger children performed at floor. We conclude that children's difficulty is likely to be due to the ill-structured nature of tool innovation problems, in which components of a solution must be retrieved and coordinated. Older children struggled to bring to mind components of the solution but could coordinate them, whereas younger children could not coordinate components even when explicitly provided.

One important element of complex and flexible tool use, particularly where tool manufacture is in... more One important element of complex and flexible tool use, particularly where tool manufacture is involved, is the ability to select or manufacture appropriate tools anticipating the needs of any given task -an ability that has been rarely tested in non-primates. We examine aspects of this ability in New Caledonian crows -a species known to be extraordinary tool users and manufacturers. In a 2002 study, Chappell and Kacelnik showed that these crows were able to select a tool of the appropriate length for a task among a set of different lengths, and in 2002, Weir, Chappell and Kacelnik showed that New Caledonian crows were able to shape unfamiliar materials to create a usable tool for a specific task. Here we examine their handling of tool diameter. In experiment 1, we show that when facing three loose sticks that were usable as tools, they preferred the thinnest one. When the three sticks were presented so that one was loose and the other two in a bundle, they only disassembled the bundle when their preferred tool was tied. In experiment 2, we show that they manufacture, and modify during use, a tool of a suitable diameter from a tree branch, according to the diameter of the hole through which the tool will have to be inserted. These results add to the developing picture of New Caledonian crows as sophisticated tool users and manufacturers, having an advanced level of folk physics. Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at http:// dx.

PLOS ONE, 2015

For orangutans, the largest predominantly arboreal primates, discontinuous canopy presents a part... more For orangutans, the largest predominantly arboreal primates, discontinuous canopy presents a particular challenge. The shortest gaps between trees lie between thin peripheral branches, which offer the least stability to large animals. The affordances of the forest canopy experienced by orangutans of different ages however, must vary substantially as adult males are an order of magnitude larger in size than infants during the early stages of locomotor independence. Orangutans have developed a diverse range of locomotor behaviour to cross gaps between trees, which vary in their physical and cognitive demands. The aims of this study were to examine the ontogeny of orangutan gap crossing behaviours and to determine which factors influence the distance orangutans crossed. A non-invasive photographic technique was used to quantify forearm length as a measure of body size. We also recorded locomotor behaviour, support use and the distance crossed between trees. Our results suggest that gap crossing varies with both physical and cognitive development. More complex locomotor behaviours, which utilized compliant trunks and lianas, were used to cross the largest gaps, but these peaked in frequency much earlier than expected, between the ages of 4 and 5 years old, which probably reflects play behaviour to perfect locomotor techniques. Smaller individuals also crossed disproportionately large gaps relative to their size, by using support deformation. Our results suggest that orangutans acquire the full repertoire of gap crossing techniques, including the more cognitively demanding ones, before weaning, but adjust the frequency of the use of these techniques to their increasing body size.

Journal of experimental child psychology, 2014

Currently, there are relatively few tasks suitable for testing planned problem solving in childre... more Currently, there are relatively few tasks suitable for testing planned problem solving in children. We presented 4- to 10-year-old children (N=172) with two planning tasks (sequential planning and advance planning) using the paddle-box apparatus, which was originally designed to investigate the planning skills of nonhuman apes. First, we were interested in the development of children's performance in the two tasks and whether the strategies children used to succeed differed among age groups. Performance improved significantly across age groups in both tasks. Strategies for success in the advance planning task differed among age groups, with 4- and 5-year-olds performing more excess actions, and a greater proportion of irrelevant excess actions, than older children. Findings are discussed in relation to the development of performance in tower tasks, which are a commonly used test of planning ability in humans. Second, based on previous findings with apes, we predicted that introd...

Frontiers in psychology, 2014

In three studies, we explored the retention and transfer of tool-making knowledge, learnt from an... more In three studies, we explored the retention and transfer of tool-making knowledge, learnt from an adult demonstration, to other temporal and task contexts. All studies used a variation of a task in which children had to make a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tall transparent tube. Children who failed to innovate the hook tool independently saw a demonstration. In Study 1, we tested children aged 4-6 years (N = 53) who had seen the original demonstration 3 months earlier. Performance was excellent at the second time, indicating that children's knowledge was retained over the 3 month period. In Studies 2 and 3 we explored transfer of the new knowledge to other tasks. In Study 2, children were given two variants of the apparatus that differed in surface characteristics (e.g., shape and color). Participants generalized their knowledge to these new apparatuses even though the new pipecleaner also differed in size and color. Five- to 6-year-olds (N = 22) almost always transferre...

This article examines two issues: the role of gesture in the communication of spatial information... more This article examines two issues: the role of gesture in the communication of spatial information and the relation between communication and mental representation. Children (8-10 years) and adults walked through a space to learn the locations of six hidden toy animals and then explained the space to another person. In Study 1, older children and adults typically gestured when describing the space and rarely provided spatial information in speech without also providing the information in gesture. However, few 8-yearolds communicated spatial information in speech or gesture. Studies 2 and 3 showed that 8-year-olds did understand the spatial arrangement of the animals and could communicate spatial information if prompted to use their hands. Taken together, these results indicate that gesture is important for conveying spatial relations at all ages and, as such, provides us with a more complete picture of what children do and do not know about communicating spatial relations.

Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, 2013

Comparative CognitionExperimental Explorations of Animal Intelligence, 2009

... Caledonian Crows Alex Kacelnik, Jackie Chappell, Ben Kenward & Alex AS Weir ... “The firs... more ... Caledonian Crows Alex Kacelnik, Jackie Chappell, Ben Kenward & Alex AS Weir ... “The first indications that our ancestors were in any respect unusual among animals were our extremely crude stone tools that began to appear in Africa by around two-and-a-half million years ...

Proceedings of the Royal …, 1995

... use the sun compass rather than fixed directional visual cues in an open-field arena food-searc... more ... use the sun compass rather than fixed directional visual cues in an open-field arena food-searching task JACKIE CHAPPELL AND ... However, denial of visual landmark cues slows homing from familiar but not unfamiliar sites (Braithwaite & Guilford 1991, 1994; Braithwaite 1993 ...

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2011

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2004

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 1996

... TIM GUILFORD AND JACKIE CHAPPELL ... several kinds of information (including song types, diet... more ... TIM GUILFORD AND JACKIE CHAPPELL ... several kinds of information (including song types, dietary preferences, and foraging skills) either directly from, or more effectively in the presence of, experienced conspecifics (for reviews see Galef 1988, 1993; Heyes 1993; Nicol 1995 ...

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2012

Do we fully understand the structure of the problems we present to our subjects in experiments on... more Do we fully understand the structure of the problems we present to our subjects in experiments on animal cognition, and the information required to solve them? While we currently have a good understanding of the behavioural and neurobiological mechanisms underlying associative learning processes, we understand much less about the mechanisms underlying more complex forms of cognition in animals. In this study, we present a proposal for a new way of thinking about animal cognition experiments. We describe a process in which a physical cognition task domain can be decomposed into its component parts, and models constructed to represent both the causal events of the domain and the information available to the agent. We then implement a simple set of models, using the planning language MAPL within the MAPSIM simulation environment, and applying it to a puzzle tube task previously presented to orangutans. We discuss the results of the models and compare them with the results from the experiments with orangutans, describing the advantages of this approach, and the ways in which it could be extended.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2013

We know that even young children are proficient tool users, but until recently, little was known ... more We know that even young children are proficient tool users, but until recently, little was known about how they make tools. Here, we will explore the concepts underlying tool making, and the kinds of information and putative cognitive abilities required for children to manufacture novel tools. We will review the evidence for novel tool manufacture from the comparative literature and present a growing body of data from children suggesting that innovation of the solution to a problem by making a tool is a much more challenging task than previously thought. Children's difficulty with these kinds of tasks does not seem to be explained by perseveration with unmodified tools, difficulty with switching to alternative strategies, task pragmatics or issues with permission. Rather, making novel tools (without having seen an example of the required tool within the context of the task) appears to be hard, because it is an example of an 'ill-structured problem'. In this type of ill-structured problem, the starting conditions and end goal are known, but the transformations and/or actions required to get from one to the other are not specified. We will discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the development of problem-solving in humans and other animals.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2014

Tool innovation-designing and making novel tools to solve tasksis extremely difficult for young c... more Tool innovation-designing and making novel tools to solve tasksis extremely difficult for young children. To discover why this might be, we highlighted different aspects of tool making to children aged 4 to 6 years (N = 110). Older children successfully innovated the means to make a hook after seeing the pre-made target tool only if they had a chance to manipulate the materials during a warm-up. Older children who had not manipulated the materials and all younger children performed at floor. We conclude that children's difficulty is likely to be due to the ill-structured nature of tool innovation problems, in which components of a solution must be retrieved and coordinated. Older children struggled to bring to mind components of the solution but could coordinate them, whereas younger children could not coordinate components even when explicitly provided.