| Background. Like many corvids, ravens and scrub jays cache food items by burying them in the ground, saving them for later. If possible, they will not only retrieve their own caches, but also pilfer those of others. However, thieves can only find caches if they watch them being made. This creates a strong incentive for food storers to stay out of sight as they cache, to create false impressions of where their stash is hidden, and to rehide items later if they can't help being observed. Accordingly, this is exactly what they do. In fact, the deceptive strategies employed by both species are so impressive, that various scientists have started to speculate that they may possess aspects of 'Theory of Mind' (ToM), the ability to reason about the minds of others. Specifically, they may understand the concept of seeing. It is, however, nearly impossible to establish this conclusively: Virtually every seemingly "ToM-like" behavior also has a plausible "low-level" explanation, which assumes associative learning or an innate disposition. This project. In my Phd. project, the aim is to simulate a population of 'virtual corvids' in an agent-based model, and to examine how different internal representations affect external behavior. Using techniques from artificial intelligence, agents will be created with varying degrees of "ToM-like" decision mechanisms. These 'virtual corvids' will be exposed to the same experimental paradigms as their biological counterparts, to examine which accounts of corvid mentality best explain the data. |
