How do you know that the cookies are still there although
they have been placed out of your sight into the drawer? How do you know when and
where a car that has driven into a tunnel will reappear? The ability to
represent and to track the trajectory of objects, which are temporally out of
sight, is highly important in many aspects but is also cognitively demanding.
Alice Auersperg and her team from the University of Vienna and Oxford show that
"object permanence" abilities in a cockatoo levels apes and four year
old human toddlers. The researchers published their findings in the journal
"Journal of Comparative Psychology".