Open AccessUsing 3D modelling and printing to study avian cognition from different geometric dimensions
Author(s) -
Canchao Yang,
Wei Liang,
Anders Pape Møller
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
royal society open science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.84
H-Index - 51
ISSN - 2054-5703
DOI - 10.1098/rsos.181938
Subject(s) - cognition , computer science , dimension (graph theory) , spatial cognition , animal cognition , cognitive psychology , cognitive science , human–computer interaction , artificial intelligence , psychology , mathematics , neuroscience , pure mathematics
Studying animal cognition is meaningful because it helps us understand how animals adapt to the natural environment. Many birds build nests, clean their nests and reject foreign objects from their nests, which provide an optimal opportunity for studying their cognition toward foreign objects in nests. However, hand-made models used in previous studies have many deficiencies that considerably constrain our capacity to understand the evolution of avian cognition of foreign objects because they are unquantifiable and dependent on different features. We established a 3D modelling and printing method to manipulate one geometric dimension of a model while controlling for others, which allowed us to investigate avian cognition for different dimensions independently. Here we introduce this method, conduct an empirical study as an example, and discuss its applications to further studies.