Cognitive Control in Distracted Dinosaurs

Cognitive control is a skill used to control one’s own behaviour to reach a goal. We compared this skill across archosaurs by using the distraction task on American alligators, emus, chickens, and common ravens. We investigated whether the animals would still find a food reward hidden behind one of two identical opaque barriers after picking up a food distraction. Results show that all species can find the hidden food reward despite being distracted, but the presence of a distraction impaired the performance of all species except the common raven. All species being from the clade Archosauria, it suggests that cognitive control is a conserved ability which underwent little changes since their last common ancestor, allowing to draw some inferences about extinct related taxa (e.g., non-avian dinosaurs). Moreover, raven’s unflinching performance could be explained by the sharp increase in telencephalic neuron numbers which occurred in the clade Telluraves.