Desire-state attribution in non-human animals: insights from Eurasian jay food-sharing behaviour

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• Dr Ljerka Ostojic, Dept Psychology/Sub-Dept Animal Behaviour, University of Cambridge
• Wednesday 23 October 2013, 12:30-13:30
• Library, Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, Madingley.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Diane Pearce.

State attribution is the ability to ascribe to others an internal life like one’s own. Despite extensive research, comparative studies struggle to adequately integrate key factors of state-attribution that have been identified by evolutionary and developmental psychology as well as research on empathy. Over the last five years, we have developed a novel behavioural paradigm to address these issues and investigate whether male Eurasian jays respond to the changing desire-state of their female partner when sharing food. Using a specific satiety paradigm, we were able to manipulate the female’s desire towards different food types: after pre-feeding her one type of food, her subsequent desire for that food decreased such that she preferred the other, non-pre-fed food. After watching the female being pre-fed on one type of food, the male was subsequently capable of flexibly adjusting his food-sharing behaviour according to the female’s desire. I will present a series of experiments investigating whether the male jay’s food-sharing behaviour satisfies two behavioural criteria for state-attribution, namely self-other differentiation and response to an internal, otherwise unobservable state and discuss whether these findings can bring us a step closer to understanding state-attribution in these birds.

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