ArticleBiology letters2016
Does absolute brain size really predict self-control? Hand-tracking training improves performance on the A-not-B task.
Article in Biology letters, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Unpacking response inhibition in animals - part 1: a conceptual framework.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Inhibitory control tests in non-human animals: validity, reliability, and perspectives.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Embodied cognitive evolution and the limits of convergence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Self-control has a social role in primates, but not in other mammals or birds.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Inhibitory control in teleost fish: a methodological and conceptual review.Animal cognition · 2024Review
- Tolerant macaque species are less impulsive and reactive.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Performance on inhibitory tasks does not relate to handedness in several small groups of Callitrichids.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Recent developments in parrot cognition: a quadrennial update.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Validation of a battery of inhibitory control tasks reveals a multifaceted structure in non-human primates.PeerJ · 2022Article
- Heterogeneity of performances in several inhibitory control tasks: male rhesus macaques are more easily distracted than females.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Comparative cognition in three understudied ungulate species: European bison, forest buffalos and giraffes.Frontiers in zoology · 2021Article
- Ravens parallel great apes in physical and social cognitive skills.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Macphail's Null Hypothesis of Vertebrate Intelligence: Insights From Avian Cognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
- Delayed gratification in New Caledonian crows and young children: influence of reward type and visibility.Animal cognition · 2020Article
- Response learning confounds assays of inhibitory control on detour tasks.Animal cognition · 2020Article
- Unpredictable environments enhance inhibitory control in pheasants.Animal cognition · 2019Article
- New Caledonian crows infer the weight of objects from observing their movements in a breeze.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Comparing chimpanzees' preparatory responses to known and unknown future outcomes.Biology letters · 2018Article
- Comparative psychometrics: establishing what differs is central to understanding what evolves.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Do detour tasks provide accurate assays of inhibitory control?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Large-scale, comparative cognition studies are set to revolutionize the way we investigate and understand the evolution of intelligence. However, the conclusions reached by such work have a key limitation: the cognitive tests themselves. If factors other than cognition can systematically affect the performance of a subset of animals on these tests, we risk drawing the wrong conclusions about how intelligence evolves. Here, we examined whether this is the case for the A-not-B task, recently used by MacLean and co-workers to study self-control among 36 different species. Non-primates performed poorly on this task; possibly because they have difficulty tracking the movements of a human demonstrator, and not because they lack self-control. To test this, we assessed the performance of New Caledonian crows on the A-not-B task before and after two types of training. New Caledonian crows trained to track rewards moved by a human demonstrator were more likely to pass the A-not-B test than birds trained on an unrelated choice task involving inhibitory control. Our findings demonstrate that overlooked task demands can affect performance on a cognitive task, and so bring into question MacLean's conclusion that absolute brain size best predicts self-control.
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