Toolkits for Cognition: From Core Knowledge to Genes

Vallortígara, Giorgio; Rosa‐Salva, Orsola

doi:10.1002/9781118540770.ch9

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 163 publications

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“…The empirical evidence presented in this review, taking advantage of domestic chicks and their precocial behaviours, favours the second hypothesis. Naive animals, namely, newly hatched chicks and human newborns, show biased attention toward specific motion cues common to most living organisms, and those naive biases are likely encoded by common neural mechanisms shaped by reciprocal interactions between social experience and genetic information (see Vallortigara and Rosa-Salva, 2017 for a comprehensive review). Researchers, now, need to elucidate how and in what form those social predispositions are encoded in the brain.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life is in motion (through a chick’s eye)

Lemaire

Vallortígara

2022

Anim Cogn

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Cognitive scientists, social psychologists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, ethologists and many others have all wondered how brains detect and interpret the motion of living organisms. It appears that specific cues, incorporated into our brains by natural selection, serve to signal the presence of living organisms. A simple geometric figure such as a triangle put in motion with specific kinematic rules can look alive, and it can even seem to have intentions and goals. In this article, we survey decades of parallel investigations on the motion cues that drive animacy perception—the sensation that something is alive—in non-human animals, especially in precocial species, such as the domestic chick, to identify inborn biological predispositions. At the same time, we highlight the relevance of these studies for an understanding of human typical and atypical cognitive development.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life is in motion (through a chick’s eye)

Lemaire

Vallortígara

2022

Anim Cogn

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“…In addition to the face and BM, both chicks and humans have a visual predisposition to other cues of animacy (Rosa-Salva et al, 2011;Vallortigara and Rosa-Salva, 2017;Vallortigara, 2021b for reviews). For example, living organisms are characterized by selfpropelling animacy, a well-established preference in both human babies (Di Giorgio et al, 2016b) et al, 2021b), as observed in newly hatched chicks with distinct inherited variability (Versace et al, 2017(Versace et al, , 2019 (for involvement of septal and hypothalamic nuclei, see Lorenzi et al, 2017).…”

Section: Animacymentioning

confidence: 99%

The domestic chick as an animal model of autism spectrum disorder: building adaptive social perceptions through prenatally formed predispositions

Matsushima,

Izumi,

Vallortigara

2024

Front. Neurosci.

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Equipped with an early social predisposition immediately post-birth, humans typically form associations with mothers and other family members through exposure learning, canalized by a prenatally formed predisposition of visual preference to biological motion, face configuration, and other cues of animacy. If impaired, reduced preferences can lead to social interaction impairments such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) via misguided canalization. Despite being taxonomically distant, domestic chicks could also follow a homologous developmental trajectory toward adaptive socialization through imprinting, which is guided via predisposed preferences similar to those of humans, thereby suggesting that chicks are a valid animal model of ASD. In addition to the phenotypic similarities in predisposition with human newborns, accumulating evidence on the responsible molecular mechanisms suggests the construct validity of the chick model. Considering the recent progress in the evo-devo studies in vertebrates, we reviewed the advantages and limitations of the chick model of developmental mental diseases in humans.

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Toolkits for Cognition: From Core Knowledge to Genes

Cited by 2 publications

References 163 publications

Life is in motion (through a chick’s eye)

Life is in motion (through a chick’s eye)

The domestic chick as an animal model of autism spectrum disorder: building adaptive social perceptions through prenatally formed predispositions

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