I completed my DPhil at the University of Oxford, where I subsequently spent several years studying various aspects of animal cognition. My work at Oxford focused on the cognition of tool manufacturing behaviour in New Caledonian crows. Since moving to the University of Birmingham in 2004, my interests have broadened to encompass investigating the cognitive architecture involved in the perception of affordances (the ways in which objects can be manipulated and used) 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? My current research primarily focuses on various species of parrots, but I am also interested in human cognition and the design of  behaviourally flexible, interactive robots, able to explore and learn about their environment.

I have also been collaborating closely with several people in the School of Computer Science, particularly Aaron Sloman (with whom I have written several papers - see Publications), Jeremy Wyatt, and other members of the CoSy team. I have also just started a collaboration with Dr Susannah Thorpe on the cognition of orangutan locomotion.

I teach on second and third year courses dealing with learning and cognition (BIO232), human evolution (BIO380) and integrative animal biology (BIO332), and run a 3-week field-based project module in the Pantanal, Brazil in collaboration with Dr. Susannah Thorpe.

Sloman, A. and Chappell, J.  2007). Computational cognitive epigenetics. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 30:375-376.

Chappell, J. and Sloman, A.  2007. Natural and artificial meta-configured altricial information-processing systems. International Journal of Unconventional Computing. 3: 211-239.

Chappell, J.  2006. Avian cognition: Understanding tool use.Current Biology. 7: R244-R245.

Kacelnik, A., Chappell, J., Weir, A.A.S. and Kenward, B.  2006. Cognitive adaptations for tool-related behaviour in New Caledonian crows. In: Comparative Cognition: Experimental Explorations of Animal Intelligence. eds. Wasserman, E.A and Zentall, T.R. pp. 515-528. OUP, Oxford.

Kacelnik, A., Chappell, J., Weir, A.A.S. and Kenward, B.  2005. Tool use and manufacture in birds. In: Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior Volume 3. ed. Bekoff, M. pp. 1067-1069. Greenwood Publishing Group.