Amanda Seed

+44 (0)1223 742101
ams79@cam.ac.uk

Contrary to popular belief, my research here at madingley is not concerned with training the rook faction of a corvid army! Instead, I am interested in the cognitive abilities of rooks (Corvus frugilegus), and am exploring the similarities and differences between those abilities in the social and physical domains, for a PhD supervised by Dr Nicky Clayton and Dr Nathan Emery. The rook is a particularly interesting subject for such a comparison, as it is highly social, but it is not reported to use tools in the wild. I plan to examine their appreciation of causality, as opposed to solving problems (both social and physical) through a process of trial and error learning.

I am testing rooks on physical tasks, such as the trap tube paradigm in collaboration with Sabine Tebbich, to investigate whether or not they understand elements of causal reasoning such as mediating forces and functional connections.

My undergraduate project, which I conducted under the supervision of Dr Nicky Clayton and Dr Nathan Emery, reported the formation of alliances in juvenile rooks, in which birds co-operated to gain a competitive advantage over their group mates. I hope to use caching experiments and co-operative tasks to uncover the extent to which they appreciate each other as causal agents. (I also plan to investigate the post-conflict behaviour of these birds.)

It is my hope that by gathering such information we may be able to shed further light on the evolution of large brains in corvids, and the domain in which selective pressures favoured the evolution of 'intelligence'. I am interested in comparing the growing evidence from this group with that from their counterpart in the world of mammals: primates.

My PhD is funded by the BBSRC.