Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone.

Culture refers to behaviours that are socially learned and persist within a population over time. Increasing evidence suggests that animal culture can, like human culture, be cumulative: characterized by sequential innovations that build on previous ones. However, human cumulative culture involves behaviours so complex that they lie beyond the capacity of any individual to independently discover during their lifetime.

People infer communicative action through an expectation for efficient communication.

Humans often communicate using body movements like winks, waves, and nods. However, it is unclear how we identify when someone's physical actions are communicative. Given people's propensity to interpret each other's behavior as aimed to produce changes in the world, we hypothesize that people expect communicative actions to efficiently reveal that they lack an external goal.

Ignorance matters.

The ability to reason about ignorance is an important and often overlooked representational capacity. Phillips and colleagues assume that knowledge representations are inevitably accompanied by ignorance representations. We argue that this is not necessarily the case, as agents who can reason about knowledge often fail on ignorance tasks, suggesting that ignorance should be studied as a separate representational capacity.

Cleaner fish are sensitive to what their partners can and cannot see.

Much of human experience is informed by our ability to attribute mental states to others, a capacity known as theory of mind. While evidence for theory of mind in animals to date has largely been restricted to primates and other large-brained species, the use of ecologically-valid competitive contexts hints that ecological pressures for strategic deception may give rise to components of theory of mind abilities in distantly-related taxonomic groups. In line with this hypothesis, we show that cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) exhibit theory of mind capacities akin to those observed in primates in the context of their cooperative cleaning mutualism.

Foraging Bumblebees Selectively Attend to Other Types of Bees Based on Their Reward-Predictive Value.

Using social information can be an efficient strategy for learning in a new environment while reducing the risks associated with trial-and-error learning. Whereas social information from conspecifics has long been assumed to be preferentially attended by animals, heterospecifics can also provide relevant information. Because different species may vary in their informative value, using heterospecific social information indiscriminately can be ineffective and even detrimental.

Metacognition in canids: A comparison of dogs (Canis familiaris) and dingoes (Canis dingo).

Metacognition refers to the ability to monitor one's own mental states. In the current study, we investigate whether domesticated dogs (Canis familiaris) and nondomesticated dingoes (Canis dingo) demonstrate metacognition by seeking information to remedy their own ignorance. In 2 studies, we used a naturalistic information-seeking paradigm in which subjects observed a human experimenter hiding a food reward behind an apparatus.