Jackie completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford, where she subesquently spent several years studying various aspects of animal cognition. Most recently, her work has focussed on the cognition of tool manufacturing behaviour in New Caledonian crows. These birds manufacture and use at least three distinct types of tool: hook tools made out of twigs, stepped and tapered tools made from Pandanus leaves, and straight sticks. This behaviour is unique among free- living non-humans because of the use of hooks, the degree of standardisation of the tools, and the use of different tool types. One interesting question is whether tool manufacture is rare because of the scarcity of selection pressure on species to use tools, or whether tool use and manufacture requires advanced cognitive capabilities which most species do not possess.
Since moving to the University of Birmingham, her interests have broadened to encompass investigating the cognitive architecture involved in the perception of affordances and causality, and the way in which this develops ontogenetically and phylogenetically. For example, how do animals integrate information about affordances and relationships discovered during exploration with their pre-existing knowledge?
She is co-author of a paper on The Altricial-Precocial Spectrum for Robots to be presented at IJCAI-05.