Our research is devoted to the study of animal cognition in a broad, biological framework. Applying a number of different methodologies we investigate cognitive processes that animals use in nature. Rather than using animals as model systems to understand humans, we as biologists are oriented towards understanding the animals within a biological context. By combining the ethological and the cognitive approach we pursue a multilevel, integrative research program. As emphasized by Niko Tinbergen acknowledging the work of Konrad Lorenz, we need to understand behavior at four different levels, in terms of phylogeny (historical), adaptation (function), causation (mechanism) and development (ontogeny). We try to combine experimental and comparative approaches, pursuing the concept of converging operations by testing the species in question with a battery of different tests in the lab and the field. Theoretical work is concerned with the evolution of cognition. Applied work focuses on human-animal interactions and ethical issues.

We are working in several laboratories in Vienna, as well as at field sites in Austria, New Zealand and Brazil with several avian and mammalian species.

Our current research projects cluster around four topics of animal cognition:

Probably the most fundamental component or groundwork of cognition is categorization. Using improved methodologies, we have demonstrated that pigeons can categorize pictures as complex as those encountered in ordinary human experience. The underlying cognitive mechanisms include picture memorization, feature learning, prototype formation and the abstraction of concepts. In a recent series of experiments, we found that pigeons classified visually complex, natural images (male and female human faces) by means of their global properties, which covaried with the semantic content of the categories. We concluded that natural categories and visual classes are coextensive, i.e., that behavioral and perceptual contingencies are conjointly correlated with environmental dimensions of variance. Recently we have begun accompanying studies on the perception of biological motion to serve social recognition, the abstraction of three-dimensional structure from motion, and the functional asymmetry of the pigeon brain.

In the in-animate environment problems arise from the interaction with objects, the understanding of physics (“folk physics“), of time, space and causality. For many decades, most researchers who have investigated such technical problems like tool use have emphasized trial-and-error exploration and fortuitous discovery of solutions to problems that are reinforced by operative conditioning as the mechanisms of discovery and learning. We think that this view underestimates the cognitive abilities of many species. Using the kea as model, we study causal understanding, insightful behavior, object permanence, the understanding of tertiary relations, and other forms of sensory-motor intelligence. We also want to understand how these capacities develop during ontogeny. We aim at understanding the major constraints of cognitive abilities, for example when, why and in what contexts individuals are explorative and how that is affected by neophobia. Furthermore, we started to relate individual behavioral phenotype (personality) with exploration and different aspects of (social) learning. In order to investigate those questions in a completely controlled manner, we have begun to hand-raise keas and to observe their development from hatching as complete as possible. Comparisons with ravens and jackdaws (at the KLF in Grünau ) provide some insight into the selective pressures for the evolution of technical cognition.