Data from: Using 3D modeling and printing to study avian cognition from different geometric dimensions

Studying animal cognition is meaningful because it helps us understand how
animals adapt to the natural environment. Many birds build nests, clean
their nests and reject foreign objects from their nests, which provide an
optimal opportunity for studying their cognition toward foreign objects in
nests. However, hand-made models used in previous studies have many
deficiencies that considerably constrain our capacity to understand the
evolution of avian cognition of foreign objects because they are
unquantifiable and dependent on different features. We established a 3D
modeling and printing method to manipulate one geometric dimension of a
model while controlling for others, which allowed us to investigate avian
cognition for different dimensions independently. Here we introduce this
method, conduct an empirical study as an example, and discuss its
applications to further studies.