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How Do Children Solve Aesop’s Fable? Lucy G. Cheke, Elsa Loissel, Nicola S. Clayton* Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom Abstract Studies on members of the crow family using the ‘‘Aesop’s Fable’’ paradigm have revealed remarkable abilities in these birds, and suggested a mechanism by which associative learning and folk physics may interact when learning new problems. In the present study, children between 4 and 10 years of age were tested on the same tasks as the birds. Overall the performance of the children between 5–7-years was similar to that of the birds, while children from 8-years were able to succeed in all tasks from the first trial. However the pattern of performance across tasks suggested that different learning mechanisms might be being employed by children than by adult birds. Specifically, it is possible that in children, unlike corvids, performance is not affected by counter-intuitive mechanism cues. Citation: Cheke LG, Loissel E, Clayton NS (2012) How Do Children Solve Aesop’s Fable? PLoS ONE 7(7): e40574. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0040574 Editor: Thomas Burne, University of Queensland, Australia Received March 7, 2012; Accepted June 8, 2012; Published July 25, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Cheke et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The authors have no support or funding to report. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: nsc22@cam.ac.uk Introduction To investigate whether the birds’ performance