Audio

Intro

Kosovicheva: You’re listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast.

Now, here is your host, Laura Mickes.

Intro to the interview with Professor Nicky Clayton

Mickes: Nicky Clayton (pictured below) is a Professor of Comparative Cognition in the Department of Psychology at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Clare College. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2010. Nicky is also Scientist in Residence at Rambert (the UK’s flagship touring Dance Company), collaborating with the former Artistic Director and currently Choreographer in Residence in the Psychology Department at Cambridge University, Mark Baldwin OBE, on new choreographic works inspired by science.

She also has a second science-arts collaboration with Professor Clive Wilkins MMC, Artist in Residence in the Psychology Department at Cambridge University, exploring what magic effects reveal about constraints on cognition in corvids, monkeys, and humans. I’m fortunate to be speaking with Nicky about the Learning & Behaviour special issue in honor of her contributions.

Transcripts of the interview with Professor Nicky Clayton

Mickes: Hi, Nicky. Thanks for meeting with me, and congratulations on your prestigious award from the Comparative Cognition Society, adding to the long list of awards that you’ve earned in your career. Thank you.

Clayton: Thank you. It’s lovely to meet you.

Mickes: Lovely to meet you, too. So, you’ve had a phenomenal impact on the field, and much of your work is studying cognition of corvids and human children. You have so many impressive studies and clever experimental designs. It’s one of the things that impresses me most about comparative psychology is how creative you have to be to come up with the designs. But I guess my first question to you is, why corvids?

Clayton: Well, because when it comes to intelligence, they’re as clever as the non-human great apes.

Mickes: Wow. That’s impressive. You know, I had, I had a friend, we went to the zoo, a very smart friend of mine, probably my smartest friend. We went to the zoo and I asked him, what’s your favorite animal? And he said, the crows, because they have complete freedom. <Laugh>.

Clayton: Perfect. Yeah.

Mickes: It was such a great …

Clayton: I’m instantly a fan. <Laugh>. You can tell him.

Mickes: I’ll tell him. He’ll really appreciate that. So it’s, it’s simply because they’re so clever and we can learn a lot from them. And you have.

Clayton: Well, and I think we can learn a lot in different ways. You see chimpanzees, relatively speaking, are quite like us. We share many things in common with them. Hands, feet, opposable thumbs. The rest of it. They’re our close relatives, our cousins, if you like. Crows are so different. They live in much more of a three-dimensional world because they fly.

Mickes: Oh yeah.

Clayton: And so the whole bird thing is intriguing to me. I’ve always wondered what it’s like to fly.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: And I’ve been on an airplane. It’s what got me into dance as well as science and what it’s like to have wings and what it’s like to think without hands.

Mickes: Wow.

Clayton: And that sort of whole concept has driven my scientific career and my other career. You know, it’s also driven my passion for dance and choreography because it’s, you know, it makes you think more about movement and the idea that intelligence is embodied. You need neural machinery and a good brain to operate, but there’s so much more than just the brain.

Mickes: Right. I was gonna ask you all about dance toward the end, but I’m glad you’re, you’re mentioning it now because I, I’m not sure if many people would know that about you. I read somewhere that tango is your dance. There’s another one too. But tango is one.

Clayton: Tango is one. Salsa’s one. I do lots of ballet and contemporary and jazz. Improv. Yeah.

Mickes: And choreography.

Clayton: Yeah. Well, I work with the brilliant Mark Baldwin OBE and have done so for the past, oh, 16 years, I suppose. And we use movement-based ideas to explore choreography.

Mickes: So that’s how you combine science and dance.

Clayton: Well, one of the ways. Yeah.

Mickes: How else can you do that?

Clayton: Well, the other way in which I’ve been doing it scientifically, I suppose, is looking at the importance of magic effects for looking at constraints on cognition. This is work I have conducted with Clive Wilkins, who is Artist in Residence in the Department and a Member of the Magic Circle.

Mickes: Did you say magic? Magic?

Clayton: Magic as in, you know, cognitive illusions.

Mickes: Right.

Clayton: As in the tricks that magicians play or perform.

Mickes: And that’s applicable in dance?

Clayton: It’s not that it’s applicable in dance, it’s that it reveals important aspects of embodied cognition.

Mickes: Right.

Clayton: Whether or not you have hands or wings. And whether or not if you have hands, you have opposable thumbs like we do. Or you just have a thumb that works more like a finger. It isn’t, opposable may fundamentally affect not only how you pick up a cup. So because I’ve got opposable thumbs, I can pick up my coffee cup using my finger and thumb and pinching. But if I was a cuttlefish or a crow, I couldn’t do that cause although I might have a number of arms and some tentacles, I don’t have a finger with an opposable thumb. And if I’m a bird, I have wings with feathers. But in neither case, so they work that way. But it doesn’t only affect how I can pick up my cup, which allows me to sip my little cup of espresso or how it interprets and affects the way I, I process information about what I thought I saw and what I think I remembered.

Mickes: Right. So does that make it extra hard then to compare, say, corvids with humans with the thumbs is…

Clayton: Well, I, I think it probably means there are things we are missing. But I think that magic effects has been a very interesting non-linguistic tool for exploring constraints on cognition or on cognitive processes. Because most of the magic effects are visual. A human magician, of course, they have a banter, the pattern of words that goes with it. But the effect itself is largely visual.

Mickes: Right.

Clayton: I’m sure we could find exceptions to the rules, but by and large the effect you see in magic are visual, and they’re not verbal. The effect itself, the surprising thing is a surprise because you see it and you think, how the heck did they do that? Right.

Mickes: Right.

Clayton: It’s not a play on words or a difference in other kinds of experience, and therefore it is amenable to testing for nonverbal animals. You know, we can debate exactly what we mean by language, but I think it’s fair to say that no other animals that we know of on this planet, other than human beings can read and write. So if we start with, that’s our definition of language, that if by language we mean reading and writing, then I think we can say humans are the only animals that have it.

But magic effects really capitalize on seeing and the interpretation of seeing in a metacognitive level. Right. It’s about how you interpret what you think you saw, which also depends on memory, what you think you remembered. And also depends on your future thinking, what your expectations of what you think will happen next. And the biases that arise because we naturally take shortcuts in our thinking. We make assumptions about things that didn’t actually happen.

Mickes: Are there, are there shortcuts that corvids take?

Clayton: Well, I think probably all animals take shortcuts because, you know, I mean, if there’s a predator headed your way, do you really want to go, oh, he’s got a nice bum, hasn’t he? I’d rather like the look of his tail feathers <laugh> as, as the Harris hawk or the peregrine or the, the eagle approaches from above. I think you just want to go oops. I’m not gonna swear that, oops. Oh, I need to scarper right now. Yeah.

Mickes: Right.

Clayton: That bald eagle up there hovering above high above in, in the fields of Davis. He might look gorgeous, but, you know, if I could be living lunch, I think I better move right now.

Mickes: <Laugh>. Right. So some, some, and definitely and

Clayton: Shortcuts are beneficial.

Mickes: Yeah. But can get us into trouble shortcuts, like

Clayton: Well, you know, psychologically, I mean, implicit biases are one.

Mickes: Yes, exactly.

Clayton: Right.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: If a tall, large man walks in the room and a tiny little tot like me, who’s a blonde bimbo with a Lancaster accent walks in the room, they’re gonna assume that the big tall man is the professor. And I’m, you know, probably his assistant.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: Even if it is the other way round, that’s, that’s an implicit bias. That’s a gender implicit bias. But there are many other implicit biases.

Mickes: Right. Loads of ’em.

Clayton: And if you can’t see anyone and you hear them and they’ve got a very low voice, they’re probably big and dominant as well as male.

Mickes: Right.

Clayton: Even if they’re not.

Mickes: Yeah. So we’re making that assumption too.

Clayton: We make those assumptions all the time. And I’m sure animals make lots of assumptions, but the magic tricks are a nice way of getting at some of these things. Because you can look at which things animals are fooled by and which they’re not.

Mickes: Oh.

Clayton: Those patterns of similarities and differences between other animals and ourselves. Tell us something about the ways in which minds in different bodies work.

Mickes: Can you give us an example of a magic trick?

Clayton: Yeah. So, and, and all this work that I’m going to tell you about is published, but if you use something called a French drop, which is based on the ability of the magician, or magicienne since they could be a woman as well as a man. But you, to do the effect, you need to have opposable an opposable thumb and a finger. And you hold the coin in one hand and you make it disappear. And if you do that effect, the Jays are not surprised. They don’t have those expectations because they don’t have opposable thumbs and fingers.

Mickes: Right.

Clayton: But monkeys are interesting to test, because there are monkeys that do have opposable thumbs, such as capuchin monkeys. And there are also ones that don’t have opposable thumbs, such as marmoset. And the work that I’m describing here is work that was conducted primarily by my former PhD student, Elias Garcia Pellegrin, who’s now got a full position tenured professor position at the National University of Singapore. Along with my former postdoc, Alex Schnell. They’re both editors on the special issue of Learning and Behaviour.

Mickes: Yes. I read the, I read the article about you.

Clayton: You’ve read that. And also, of course, Professor Clive Wilkins (see TedX talk), who’s Artist in Residence, in the department of psychology at the University of Cambridge, who gave one of the speeches at the CO3. So this is work that we all did collaboratively. Elias’s first author, I was senior author. The Jay work is published in PNAS and the monkey work is published in Current Biology. And the monkey work additionally involved another former postdoc who’s also one of the editors, Dr. Rachael Miller. So I should give credit to all of those people. Because it’s a team effort. Right. And all my work is a team effort. It’s very important to say that; I couldn’t do any of it without the birds and the other animals I work with as well as the wonderful humans I collaborate with~ the wonderful team of colleagues.

Mickes: Yeah. I’ll, I will include links to the papers that you, you’re mentioning and to your colleagues.

Clayton: Thank you. That’s very kind. I do think it’s important. ’cause I, I would hate it to feel like Nicky Clayton is wonderful and everything else is irrelevant. That’s the complete antithesis of what I mean.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: I feel very privileged to be here. And the only way is thanks to this wonderful bunch of people and other non-human colleagues, including the Jays and the Cephalopods and the monkeys. So, but yeah, what was interesting is the Jays are fooled by some effects where a hand makes similar movements to a wing. But when a hand relies on opposable thumbs and fingers, they’re not surprised because they don’t have expectations. Or at least that’s our argument, that you need that shared biomechanical ability. And it’s not just in terms of understanding how to make the same movement, but it’s what you infer from those movements about the expectations of what you think happened and what you think will happen next.

And that relates beautifully to the world of dance and choreography, of course, which is all about how you make movements, how you copy the movements of someone else, and how you use those movements to tell stories with wordless thoughts. And of course, those stories may be standard fiction and well-known stories, which is often the case in ballet, you know, Giselle, Swan Lake, Manon so on and so forth. Or it could be with completely new topics, conceptually rich, possibly conceptually raw as well in the form of contemporary dance where, you know, the story is not a fiction story. It may be a non-fiction story where you are trying to get across ideas and emotions in ways that you think are potentially more powerful without words.

Mickes: Wow. Yeah.

Clayton: That’s how in my world, all those things

Mickes: Link together.

Clayton: Together.

Mickes: Right. So it’s not just birds, you, the cuttlefish, you mentioned, and then marmosets and capuchins… all, kinds of critters. <Laugh>, you’ve tested animals…

Clayton: Yeah. I’ve done stuff with elephants and

Mickes: Elephants too?!

Clayton: And dogs. Yeah. Well, another editor of the special issue, Josh Plotnick, he worked in my lab when he was a post-doc and I published work with him on elephant cognition as well as corvid cognition.

Mickes: I’m gonna have to read up on it.

Clayton: It’s quite, it’s quite varied. Yeah.

Mickes: Incredible. What, what a career! I am. I am just I, I guess impressed <laugh> what

Clayton: No, it’s just little me. But you know, you have questions you are interested in. I think that’s the trick, isn’t it?

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: Things that inspire you that you are curious about.

Mickes: Right.

Clayton: Otherwise, you know, it will never happen.

Mickes: Yeah. What’s, what’s the point? It’s like doing something that’s not that interesting.

Clayton: Otherwise, I may as well wash the floor or go for a walk or

Mickes: Yeah. <Laugh>

Clayton: Have a massage or something.

Mickes: Oh, that sounds nice, actually.

Clayton: It does, doesn’t it?

Mickes: <Laugh> What do you, maybe this is a stupid question these days, but what, what, what was your most surprising finding?

Clayton: Oh, I don’t know, really. There have been so many surprising findings. I guess it’s the sort of collective evidence of just how smart the corvids are. So, it’s things like discovering that they keep track of who was watching when they stashed food and how they keep track of not just which individual was watching, but depending on the dominant status, they might do different tactics. You know, it feels a bit like avian chess in a way that they keep an eye on their opponents and move things around accordingly. I think that was pretty impressive. So I think one of the papers with my husband, Nathan Emery, published in Nature all the way back in 2001, was about the idea that it takes a thief to know a thief. So if the birds, these were Scrub Jays, another species of corvid, not sure how to refer to them in terms of species name because it keeps changing. But I think in Latin, it’s Aphelocoma California, but they’ve gone from being a subspecies of the Florida scrub Jay to being the Western Scrub Jay, to being the California Scrub Jay all within the individual birds’ lifetime~ all twenty five of them! So,

Mickes: Wow. What a promotion.

Clayton: I just know them as individuals, for example as Sweetie Pie and Psycho Bird.

Mickes: <Laugh>.

Clayton: According to the American Ornithological Society, you’ve had name changes multiple times, but you’re the same. They are still my babies, my adorable scrub-jays.

Mickes: <Laugh>

Clayton: Still my feathered boys and girls.

Mickes: Are they, I’m, I’m sorry, just a side note, are they nice to work with?

Clayton: Oh, they’re gorgeous to work with, but they’re, they’re very naughty. But I have an empathy for naughty.

Mickes: You like that? Yeah. So back, back on track. I’m sorry.

Clayton: No, it’s fine. So what we found that they did was if others were watching, they would cache, hide their food, but then the moment the others had left, they’d move it to new hiding places. Something they don’t do if they are hiding their food in private when no one else is looking, or whether they’re hiding it just in front of their partner who, you know, it’s a shared agreement. So it’s not, pilfering with permission is not stealing, you know, <laugh>.

Mickes: Right. So this is like a big …

Clayton: Darling, I’ve moved the carpet. That’s all right, my love. I think I prefer it back the way it was though – after moving it back, right. That, that’s just couples partner negotiation. So something they only do if potential threats who might steal their food are watching, but only experienced birds do it. … Hardwired activity, if they haven’t had experience of stealing other birds caching, they don’t do it. So it takes a thief to know one basically. And so that’s one example. Another thing that really shocked us, I think, was that I’d always been trained as a zoologist that there are species of animals that use tools and there are species of animals that can, but you know, if you are a tool user, that’s because that’s the species you’re of. Or at least that if you are a tool user, it’s because of the environment you grow up in.

So there are woodpecker finches in some parts of the island that use tools and others that don’t. But I was very surprised to find that a lot of my corvids that are not classed as tool users would spontaneously use tools in the lab like the rooks and the Jays and not only use them, they’d also manufacture them and do so on a level comparable with that of the new Caledonian crows. And so it was always said, you know, the tool manufacturer is very, a very special thing. First of all, it was said it’s uniquely human. Jane Goodall was the first to put a kibosh on that and said, no, no chimpanzees do it too. And then later on, Russell Gray’s team including Gavin Hunt and Alex Taylor and Sarah Jelbert who showed very convincingly that, well, new Caledonian crows do it too.

It’s like, Great apes are unique because of X and then it’s some annoying little person like me comes up and says, no corvids do it too. And they’re like, oh God. Another one of those dumb things they do. But they do. But I think finding that the Rooks and Jays that don’t use tools in the wild or are not known habitually for using tools will in the lab if given a problem that needs a tool. I found that pretty remarkable as well. Because these things suggest flexibility, for one thing, you know, it’s, it’s not a hardwired pre-programmed device. If you want to steal others caches, you have to have had experience of being a thief first in order to know what to do it, how to do it. Well, that’s quite high level cognition because you’ve got to have all kinds of inferences. It’s not just training, but you have to have applied previous experiences to a new thing.

You know, if you were talking to schoolteachers, you’d probably call it transferable skills.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: I think in psychology they often call it triangulation. But I think it’s the same thing. It’s, it’s figuring out that there’s this thing you can do and you can apply it to a completely new thing. And I think that’s the same with the tool manufacturer. And it suggests they have a general cognitive toolkit that they’re just very smart. And so, you know, why would you leave your brain behind if it could be put to good use? I may not have needed it in the past, but

Mickes: That’s right. In the, in the wild. It’s

Clayton: For a new thing. Sure. I’ll use it right now if I need to.

Mickes: Exactly. Oh, that’s neat. So the thief thing is, is that just showing, it’s showing a lot of things, but the theory of mind.

Clayton: Theory of mind. Yeah. So the idea is that its experience projection that you need to have a particular experience and then you go, well, if I was in their position as a potential thief, I’d move it to a new hiding place. Yeah.

Mickes: Yeah. And they remember then the new that’s extra load for their memory that’s …

Clayton: Well, memory isn’t a problem if you’re a corvid. They’re good at that.

Mickes: They are?

Clayton: They’ve got really good memories. I think. Yea. You know, people in the past, a long time ago in America, my dear colleagues Al Kamil and Russ Balda, who were working on Scrub Jays and pinon Jays, Mexican Jays and many American corvids, did experiments looking at the longevity of their memory, showing that these birds can remember for up to nine months of the year without, and Clarks not crackers as well, another corvid showing that these birds could remember for over nine months of the year without any evidence of forgetting.

Mickes: So they don’t have

Clayton: Quite remarkable. It’s not my work.

Mickes: Alright.

Clayton: You know, it, I mean, at the time it was, it was earth-shattering.

Mickes: That’s really incredible. So no forgetting curve, like humans, we see like this

Clayton: No forgetting curve. Before asking, well, are they doing it different? Because in humans there’s something called the serial position curve, which basically is about the order in which you remember things and that things at the beginning of the list and things at the end of the list remembered better than things in the middle of the list. But we don’t quite know how the corvid do it. But it doesn’t seem to be just that.

Mickes: Right. There’s a lot more to learn about them. That’s good. Plenty of research to do. <Laugh>.

Clayton: I don’t think I’m gonna get bored anytime soon.

Mickes: No. <Laugh> I was just gonna ask you, what are you working on currently?

Clayton: Well, all kinds of things. We’re still doing magic effects. So we’ve got items hidden under cups and we are looking at under what circumstances do they find things surprising. We are looking at what kinds of inferences they make about things based on what they’ve seen and whether they make the same kind of inferences that we do. Some of that is inspired by work comparing chimpanzees and children. What else are we working on? We’re looking at all kinds of causal interventions, I would say. I can’t say any detail about these things because anything that isn’t published, you know,

Mickes: Will be stolen.

Clayton: You know, could be stolen. And you know, hopefully I have a very happy relationship with the rest of my lab, but I think you’ll find if I told of important results that have yet to be published…

Mickes: Okay. So we’ll wait.

Clayton: And the members of my lab would completely legitimately have every right to be extremely annoyed with me.

Mickes: Okay.

Clayton: I won’t say anything about results, but that kind of thing. And we’re also doing lots of interesting work on cuttlefish and their cognitive abilities. Because we’ve found that they’re also very good at doing lots of memory and future oriented tasks. So the cuttlefish, for example, eat fewer shrimp fewer crab at lunchtime if their favorite food, the shrimp, that I just mentioned, are on the menu for dinner. And they also pass the marshmallow test. So lots of really great stuff on the cuttlefish.

Clayton: And we’re now looking at various aspects of their dynamic camouflage because in a way you could almost think of it as caching, except they’re caching themselves rather than cashing their food. ’cause They’re trying to hide themselves from predators or from competitors if it’s for mating choices. So it could be sexual competition as well as predation. And we’re also looking at information seeking at curiosity both in the cuttlefish and in the corvids.

Mickes: Mm-hmm <affirmative>.

Clayton: What kinds of decisions do you make? What kind of information do you want to find out about the world and what do you deal with the information that you discover? And does it vary whether it’s certain or uncertain? And that links back to the magic. Because of course, magic effects are basically violations of expectations. The magician helps encourage you to build an expectation about the world that the magician, he, or the magician, she, cleverly then violates unbeknown to you. And that’s what leads to the surprise.

Mickes: Neat.

Clayton: So that’s kind of a taste of the things. But I can’t share with you any unpublished findings. I’m sorry.

Mickes: Okay. Thank you. No, that’s totally okay, I understand.

Clayton: The students can when they go to conferences and present posters, but you know, they need to be the first to reveal the new results. I shouldn’t be blabbing about it. Oh,

Mickes: That’s so thoughtful.

Clayton: It’s their work. They’re the ones doing all the hard work.

Mickes: Yeah. Right.

Clayton: I feel slightly guilty. I’m the one trotting off with the, I’ve got the gold prize, but I couldn’t do any of it without the hard work of my students and postdocs and other collaborators. So, you know, it’s very much a team effort. Not to mention, of course, the amazing corvids and cuttlefish and

Mickes: Yes.

Clayton: Monkeys and every, every everybody else we work with. And when I say body, It doesn’t necessarily have to be inhabited in a human body. <Laugh>

Mickes: Is your lab huge? I’m picturing this really large space with all kinds of creatures in there.

Clayton: We have a nice team of people, but we are quite distributed as well. So sometimes we do field work.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: But my corvids are at Madingley, and of course I had a big fight to save my corvid palace. And fortunately everything’s all right now. But…

Mickes: Good.

Clayton: About three years ago, it nearly closed down. And thanks to the amazing help of many, many colleagues and the general public and me doing my ever first fundraising campaign, it’s been saved. But it was awful at the time. It was very, very worrying. But we’re fine now.

Mickes: Was it because of financial problems?

Clayton: It was all kind of things including financial.

Mickes: Okay.

Clayton: But you know, the combination of Covid and Brexit …

Mickes: Oh gosh.

Clayton: And all the other things, you know.

Mickes: Right.

Clayton: Needless to say I did not vote in that way.

Mickes: Yeah. I, I don’t know any scientist who did <laugh>.

Clayton: No, no.

Mickes: I should, I maybe shouldn’t …

Clayton: Imagine American politics have certain similarities in that regard. Yeah.

Mickes: I see.

Clayton: You know, though, that I think, you know, there, there is quite a big divide there between if you are an academic or not.

Mickes: Yeah. It’s amazing. …

Clayton: 49% to 51%. I woke up in the morning and I thought I was having a nightmare and then took a sip of coffee and didn’t spill it and realized, no, I was actually awake and the news

Mickes: Was real.

Clayton: I thought, Can I go back to sleep and wake up in another world and hear a different result?

Clayton: But, no, the answer was no. No. This is real, unfortunately.

Mickes: We’ve gotta live through it.

Clayton: But the lab was saved, thank goodness.

Mickes: You saved the lab.

Clayton: Yeah. Well, I didn’t save the lab. I just asked other people to help me save the lab because I love the corvids and just wanted to make sure they were safe and happy and healthy.

Mickes: Right.

Clayton: Wonderful. It was saved. And yes,

Mickes: There’s something that Irene Pepperberg mentioned in my interview with her about having a really tough time getting funding in the beginning and, and sort throughout. But did you have that experience? Is it, I mean, it …

Clayton: Is hard. It’s so hard. And the thing is that, you know, that for me, the, the costs of maintaining the bird lab are really high.

Mickes: I can imagine.

Clayton: It’s very, very hard to justify. And in other places the costs are much less. But the costs are what they are. You know, I, cant …

Mickes: Yea

Clayton: Go and say, dear University of Cambridge, I’m sorry, I can only pay a 10th of the bill of your costs. Please help. And they have helped enormously. I mean, they’ve, you know, they’ve cut the cost by, by a vast amount to do their best to support me. But it still remains that compared with other places, the costs are very high. That’s why I call it the Corvid Palace because the birds live in these massive aviaries. You know, they’re not in tiny little cages, bird, but that’s also why they live so long and do so well in cognitive tasks. Yeah.

Mickes: How long do they live?

Clayton: Well, my oldest Scrub Jay, PsychoBird, an 80-gram bird, lived to be 25 years of age.

Mickes: Wow. You could measure aging and cognition with that bird. Did you do that?

Clayton: No, because the, there’s too many other variables

Mickes: Ah,

Clayton: Going on, right. I mean, if you want to look at aging and cognition, it’d be better to use a rat or a mouse model ’cause you’d have a big enough sample size and you could do tests on young birds and old birds. Right. And then trace longitudinally as well as between individuals of different ages. But no, they, they live to be a ripe old age, fortunately. And you know, because they’re in such luxury surroundings, they perform really well in experiments.

Mickes: They must love it <laugh>. It’s something fun to do.

Clayton: Yeah. Well, we love it. Certainly.

Mickes: Yeah. <Laugh>. Yeah. It seems so,

Clayton: I think Leonides (pictured below), he’s my kind of top Rook. He gets very, very jealous when he’s being ignored.

Mickes: Really?

Clayton: I think he’s having a bit of a tough time at the moment because one of my wonderful PhD students, Adam Timulak, has been working a lot with Leonides and they’ve built up a bond. But now Adam’s testing some of the Jays in the next Aviary and Adam has to spend a lot of extra time <laugh> just going back and playing with Leonides and reassuring him that life’s okay.

Mickes: I love you still <laugh>.

Clayton: I, I love you still. And here are the worms and, you know,

Mickes: How does he show his jealousy? Flapping around?

Clayton: Flapping and well, lots of ruckus calls.

Mickes: Oh,

Clayton: Lots of, “I am Leonides. And why are you not giving me worms?”

Mickes: <Laugh>

Clayton: So why is it that Romero’s (pictured below) getting the worms now? Am I no longer in favor? What have I done wrong?

Mickes: Oh, what a character!

Clayton: And he responds to vocal commands, like, come here and speak and amazing things. That was done by another of my wonderful PhD students, Francesca Cornero. She and I have a paper in the special issue, but not about that. But Leo’s amazing doing all the vocal commands.

Mickes: Incredible. So he, you trained him on language or she trained him?

Clayton: Well, yeah. Francesca didn’t deliberately train him. It was like he learned all these other things and she was trying to test the rest of the rooks and get them up to speed on object permanence. And she thought, well, he is so curious and he so wants to do things and interact with me, what can I do? And she’d come from Irene Pepperberg’s lab. So of course she knows all about vocal command learning in parrots.

Mickes: Right.

Clayton: Well, he is not a parrot, but he’s kinda same but different. And so she’d try out some of the techniques and it worked a charm.

Mickes: Wow. Whenever I talk to a comparative psychologist, I always get a little bit jealous. I wish I went back and maybe did a little bit of comparative psychology.

Clayton: Oh, well, if you ever cross the pond.

Mickes: I’m, I’m, I’m in Bristol. I’m just an American. <Laugh>.

Clayton: Oh, you’re in Bristol. Well, why not to Cambridge then? I assumed you were in America just ’cause you have an American accent. Yeah, yeah. But I apologize. Well, if you are in Bristol, then there’s no excuse. Why aren’t you coming to Cambridge to see us?

Mickes: I should. I’ll will!

Clayton: You have an official invite and it’s being recorded so you can prove it.

Mickes: I was like, yeah. Yeah. And oh my gosh, how exciting to get a tour of the lab and meet the birds. I can see the cuttlefish, too. Oh boy, would I love that. I’m excited now.

Clayton: All the corvids are in a sleepy little village called Madingley, that’s four miles out of Cambridge. But come and visit and I can drive you out to Madingley in my little Audi TT.

Mickes: <Laugh>. Oh, I love those. Oh, this sounds fantastic. Oh, Nicky. I’m so excited. Okay, let’s.

Clayton: There’s a lovely pub right next door, The Three Horseshoes, and it serves proper gastro pub food.

Mickes: Yes. Okay. Right.

Clayton: We’re sorted. We’ve got a date!

Mickes: Yes, we’re sorted. <Laugh>, we

Clayton: Just have to get our diaries out.

Mickes: Yeah, exactly. Okay. A pub, Nicky, science, birds. Yes. <laugh>. I am all, all about it.

Clayton: We just need a bit of sunshine because guess what’s, it’s got a lovely beer garden.

Mickes: Oh, beautiful. Today is a gorgeous day. Is it nice?

Clayton: Yeah, it’s great, isn’t

Mickes: It? Yeah. Really nice. So surprising. I know some things I like to ask people who have established careers. I like to ask, what’s your favorite part of research and what’s your least favorite part of research?

Clayton: My favorite part of research is discovering new things. Yeah. So I, I think curiosity is definitely

Mickes: Drives you.

Clayton: Drives me. So any kind of new ways of thinking about something or observing things that I didn’t expect. And then thinking about, well, how can we apply a scientific method to test that properly? That’s what I love.

Mickes: That’s …

Clayton: Where I’m kind of like, yes, yes. Let’s do it.

Mickes: Least favorite?

Clayton: My least favorite is admin.

Mickes: Oh yeah. Admin of any type or any admin?

Clayton: Yeah.

Mickes: Yeah. So I, I’ve heard getting reviews back is a a, a common disdain. A …

Clayton: You see, the thing is that because of my dance background, I don’t think I’ve been to a ballet class where I haven’t been criticized.

Mickes: Oh.

Clayton: Right. And I’m in my early sixties and I’ve been dancing a long time. So I’m used to criticism. So long as the criticism is constructive, I’m all right with it. It hurts. Yeah. But

Mickes: Yeah, it’s fine.

Clayton: Try doing Grand Battements for two minutes on each leg and tell me it doesn’t hurt. And I’ll tell you, you are a liar,

Mickes: <Laugh>.

Clayton: You know, and I still go on point and yes, it hurts, but I’ve got very strong feet muscles.

Mickes: <Laugh>.

Clayton: Hello Moriarty. [Nicky’s cat, Mori, makes an appearance.]

Mickes: A cat has just walked across the screen. I’ll just let the, the listeners know. <Laugh>

Clayton: Yeah. The, the feline. And I tell him, I love your friendly tail. Yes. <laugh>. I know you can’t go on point. He, he does join me if I ever take classes online.

Mickes: He does?

Clayton: And he loves attending the classes I do on Skype with my personal trainer, David Richards. Mori joins in.

Mickes: <Laugh>, it’s so cute, this cat. Okay. So yeah.

Clayton: Criticism hurts.

Mickes: Yes.

Clayton: But if it’s constructive. I’m all right with that. Because I’m like, well, that’s helping me move forward. You know, it would be wonderful to be perfect. Yes, please give me those genes. Give me those pills and I’ll swallow them. But I’m well aware of the fact that I’m not perfect so I’m grateful to anybody that can help point out things that I could improve by working on them. And you know, when you submit a paper or a grant, you do your best before you submit it, but you know that there’s things wrong with it. And that’s why you rely on your colleagues to help point them out and move the field further. And if they do, so long as it’s constructive, it’s great. I mean, if somebody says “this is a pile of pants,  just reject. There’s, there’s not a single word in here that I could approve of” then of course that’s, that’s really upsetting.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: But normally, you know, even if you’re annoyed with the reviewer, you are probably annoyed with the reviewer because he or she has made some really valid points and you feel a bit stupid that you didn’t think about them beforehand.

Mickes: That’s a really good outlook.

Clayton: That’s ballet training for me. You know, I, I still like ballet. So <laugh>,

Mickes: You still, it’s

Clayton: Not something you go into if you don’t like criticism. If you can’t take criticism, then <laugh> choose a different discipline. Sorry.

Mickes: I can only imagine.

Clayton: Be it in the dance world or academia. I mean, you are gonna get criticism. You’re gonna get people that have different opinions to you. And sometimes you’re just gonna be annoyed and think they’re wrong.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: But, often it’s gonna help you think about things you might have missed or strengthen the argument to make it more persuasive. Or maybe the two of you with completely opposing opinions can work together to design something, to test it, one way or another.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: And then that’s all constructive. That’s what I mean by constructive criticism.

Mickes: Yes.

Clayton: It doesn’t need to be the reviewer that says, I love this paper. I thought what you did was brilliant, except for the following points. Obviously it’s lovely if they do it that way, that

Mickes: Would be so nice. <Laugh>.

Clayton: But you know, any kind of constructive thing. Because after all, science is about progression.

Mickes: Mm-Hmm. And we need to hear these things.

Clayton: We do. You know, it’s painful. I know.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: You know, I don’t like to be told my bum looks too big in that dress, but I do need to be told …

Mickes: <Laugh>.

Clayton: Even if it hurts

Mickes: Okay.

Clayton: Pilates classes for me this week, then, you know,

Mickes: <Laugh>. I hope nobody’s telling you that!

Clayton: But you know what I mean.

Mickes: Yeah. If you have to go back and tell a PhD, PhD student, Nicky, if you could give her some advice, what would you say to her about … I don’t know anything?

Clayton: I would say don’t be too hard on yourself. Don’t get too upset by rejections. Just follow your passion.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: And just try and be open-minded as much as you can. My own motto is “enthusiastic serendipity.”

Mickes: Oh!

Clayton: So I think that really interesting opportunities could come your way and you could be so focused. I could be so, you know, I’m just looking at my fingernails now and realizing how dirty they are and how I wish I’d cleaned them before or whatever. Then you don’t see all the wonderful opportunities that come that could come your way. So I think that’s where the open-minded comes from it. And you have to accept that things are serendipitous. You know, it’s a bit like buses. You may get three rejections, one after the other, or within 48 hours.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: Maybe 24 hours.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: And then three years later you may get three positives all within a short period of time. So I think the serendipity issue is you just have to accept that it is about luck. The enthusiasm comes from knowing that you can make your own luck.

Clayton: At least in part, you can’t completely make all the luck. You know, I can’t just go, oh look, I’ve won the Nobel Prize. It’s not that simple. My work would never win a Nobel Prize anyway. But my point is that I think, by being open-minded and curious and trying to kind of open up and see where interesting things come, you grow more. But you put yourself at risk in doing so. You know, if you just want a completely safe environment, then those things probably won’t happen to you.

Mickes: Right.

Clayton: That’s, I think for me, enthusiastic serendipity is a motto that’s worked for me. It may not work for everyone. I’m not saying mine is the only way. I am just saying this is one of probably many different ways, many different approaches.

Mickes: I think that’s a lovely thing for early career scientists to hear and and keep in their minds as they’re starting out.

Clayton: What I always say to my people is if it resonates with you, keep it, use it if it’s appropriate. If it doesn’t resonate with you, put it in the bin. Yeah. Because everybody’s different. And you know, different people like different things. Different people move in different ways. Different people write in different ways. Different people do things differently. And that’s fine. Gosh, life would be awful if it didn’t have lots of diversity. And it’s so, you know,

Mickes: So boring <laugh>.

Clayton: Yeah. So those differences are good. They’re not criticism, I’m just saying if it resonates for you, go for it. If it doesn’t, fine, find another one.

Mickes: Also really good advice.

Clayton: Well, my first salsa teacher who was a gorgeous Cuban man, Nelson Batista, would say, if it works, keep it. If it doesn’t get another one.

Mickes: Love it. <Laugh>.

Clayton: Well, actually it’s quite good advice really?

Mickes: It works with science too.

Clayton: I think so. Sometimes. Not always.

Mickes: Yeah. Yeah. I could see, I could see how that works. So I like to ask comparative psychologists, because I only study human memory, but are are, are we missing a trick? The people who only study humans? I feel like we kind of are missing a trick. So what do you think?

Clayton: Well, humans are pretty diverse too. I think it really depends on what your interests are, doesn’t it?

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: You know, I wouldn’t advocate somebody to work with animals that’s worked with humans for years. If, if working with humans is what you find really interesting. There are so many really fascinating questions to pursue. Yeah. You can do it. If you like working with animals. Yeah. Especially if you don’t like humans very much. If you like both humans and non-human animals perhaps consider a combination.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: You know, I, I work with both, but I, I like people and I like animals, but people aren’t very keen on humans, in which case it might be better than they’re just working with animals.

Mickes: That is a good point. I love your positive outlook. Your lab members are so fortunate to have such, such a good role model.

Clayton: I’m so fortunate to have them. I’m the lucky one. But no, you know, I, I think the thing with science is you want to explore questions you’re passionate about. I think that’s why I say I hate the admin. You know, I know the Excel files need to be completed. I know that I need to do all this, you know, health and safety and personal training stuff.

Mickes: Oh, you just you just reminded me!

Clayton: I like personal training as you know, with my <laugh> trainer, David Richards. But the administrative training kind of courses that you have to go on, well I don’t like them but I do them because I have to. And because they’re important. It is important that we get trained so we don’t make horrible implicit biases. I I know that they’re there for a good reason. It’s just not my preferred thing to do. And unfortunately I can’t do it automatically. You know, I can’t say I’m really a fan of brushing my teeth, but I just do that automatically. I’ve just got into the habit of when I wake up in the morning, you brush your teeth, and before you go to bed, you brush your teeth. If you said to me, what would you like to do next? Brush your teeth. Or, you know,

Mickes: Or do some do admin!

Clayton: Have a glass of champagne or

Mickes: Champagne, please.

Clayton: Go <laugh>, go to dance class. Or <laugh>

Clayton: Attend a really interesting conference. I can’t say brushing my teeth would always be top of my list <laugh>, but I know I need to do it.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: Just do it. But with some of these other things, they feel more like chores. But you know that to be a good citizen, you just have to do them. Kind of like washing up. Who, who wants to do the washing up or mop the floor. But you know, if you don’t do them at some point, there’s a problem. So you just do it, some of the things you just have to do, even though they are not necessarily your preferred things.

Mickes: Right.

Clayton: Maybe you can think, well, once I’ve done this, I can do this more exciting thing afterwards.

Mickes: That’s right. Yeah. I like to get those tasks out of the way quickly.

Clayton: I’m like, get ’em done quickly. And then

Mickes: Yeah. I love equating admin to brushing your teeth.

Clayton: Yeah. I’m sorry to any administrators I’ve offended by this <laugh>. I don’t mean it to be insulting, I just mean it’s not my fav.

Mickes: They must know <laugh>. We wanna spend time researching. That’s what we wanna do. I, that’s, that’s who we are. So

Clayton: Yeah.

Mickes: It makes perfect sense.

Clayton: We need others to make sure we do these other things as well, you know?

Mickes: True. We do need, we do need them. For sure. So, so I was gonna ask you, we did talk a lot about dance kind of throughout this interview, but you, you are a scientist in residence at the Rambert Dance Company.

Clayton: Yeah, yeah. They’re called Rambert these days, but yes.

Mickes: Oh, sorry.

Clayton: Mainly, oh, they keep changing their name. It’s a bit like Scrub Jays. You know, they were Ballet Rambert and then they were Rambert Cance Company. Now they’re just Rambert. The work I’ve collaborated on is mainly with Mark Baldwin, who’s their former artistic director. And the artistic director who was longest at Rambert ever. And he’s an amazing man. Mark Baldwin. I call him the brilliant Mr. Baldwin.

Mickes: Oh, <laugh>.

Clayton: And we’ve done so much work together and continue to do. But yeah, it’s really inspiring for me. And we just, although we come from very different disciplines, we think in such similar ways, but because of that we have an amazing connection. But because of that also with our different disciplines, we have, you know, very complimentary but different skills and it just works brilliantly. Yeah.

Mickes: Getting involved with him in the, the dance company, was that serendipitous?

Clayton: It was completely serendipitous. Yeah. So I was invited to give a talk in London and Steve Jones, who was hosting me said, you look like a dancer. And I smiled and puffed at my invisible wings and my invisible feathers and went, yes. And he said, oh, well Rambert have just approached me to ask if I’d be interested in advising them on a piece about evolution. He said, I know about opera and not about dance. Steve, if you’re out there listening, I hope I’m telling the story accurately for you. I love you. And then I mentioned this to one of my friends, Nick Humphrey, and he said, oh, well, I’m having a New Year’s party love you to come as always. My cousin will be there, Stephen Kaynes, I believe he’s knows something about a new ballet that he might be commissioning that Rambert are interested in. Let me introduce you to Stephen. So I was introduced to the wonderful Stephen Kaynes, gosh, I miss him every day. He was an amazing man. And Steven said, right, let me put you in touch with Mark Baldwin. And he said, why don’t I invite you for lunch next Sunday? I said, oh, yes, please. So then I met Mark, and lunch lasted about eight hours and we completely clicked. And Mark and I have been best friends ever since.

Mickes: Incredible.

Clayton: And it, it, so it was complete serendipity, but Mark and I just clicked. I mean, you know, it could have been, I’d gone over and we’d had a lovely lunch, but we hadn’t really clicked and didn’t. But again, you know, it was serendipity had been happening to be at the talk. And somebody had said, and somebody else said, why don’t you join this party?

And through all that, you know, Mark and I met and that’s,

Mickes: That’s history. <Laugh>.

Clayton: That’s history. And now, you know, we do so many things together in Cambridge and Oxford in London, and we opened the first neuroscience and dance conference in the US. We’ve, we’ve been everywhere really. And it’s, it’s wonderful. But that’s the serendipity for you. You know, it’s the same as the serendipity of me meeting my other very close dear artist friend Clive Wilkins that I mentioned when we talked about the Magic. We met through Tango and for the first couple of years we danced together and we didn’t talk because at a milonga you’re meant to dance, not talk.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: And then eventually we started talking and discovering that he’s an artist and a writer, but we had common interests in memory and future planning and what, as scientists we know of as mental time travel and artists, they haven’t heard the term, but they know they do it for a living. And, and, you know, our tango and our partnership together then led us to realize, because he’s a professional magician, a member of the magic circle. That’s how I got into the magic stuff. Again, another wonderful example of the serendipity. You know, I, I didn’t know much about magic nor how it could be applied to animals before I met Clive. And now we are doing all kinds of experiments and publishing papers, and I think Clive has an H index of 10, which is pretty impressive.

Mickes: Wow. <laugh> Oh my goodness. That’s incredible. <Laugh>.

Clayton:

So, you know, he is an author on papers published in PNAS, Current Biology, Science.

Mickes: I’m so jealous. <Laugh>. Did he know how big these are in our little world?

Clayton: I know. Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? So that, that’s why my motto’s enthusiastic serendipity. Although it was a motto I had before I met either Mark or Clive. But it’s that you never know where ideas will end up. And if you just find them inspiring and you’re curious.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: That, that will take you in all kinds of interesting directions. You don’t necessarily know what the time that it will be useful.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: Right. But maybe it will.

Mickes: Yeah.

Clayton: And maybe it won’t. But if you, if you enjoy intellectual curiosity and you make it fun. And things happen often, not in the ways you think they will happen. So that, that for me is the thing.

Mickes: I think that’s a really nice thing to end on. And I, I think I have also taken up a lot of your time.

Clayton: Oh, that’s fine.

Mickes: Really,

Clayton: I’ve up taken a lot of your time. Thank you, Laura.

Mickes: I, well, no, I enjoyed every second of this. So thank you so much. Thank you so much, Nicky.

Clayton: My pleasure, Laura. Yeah. And keep in touch and I meant it come to Cambridge if you have time.

Mickes: Thank you. I will.

Concluding statement

Kosovicheva: Thank you for listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast. If you liked this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel using your favorite podcast player or app.

All members of the Psychonomic Society receive free access to our seven journals and are invited to attend our annual conference at no charge. Learn more and become a member by visiting us online at www.psychonomic.org.