Visuo-spatial compound stimuli discrimination with (Gryllus pennsylvanicus) in two-choices rewarding learning tasks.

This paper proposes an experimental protocol allowing Gryllus pennsylvanicus to discriminate an A-A and A-B motif pairs of compound visual stimuli. Specifically, this study consists in an operant conditioning procedure including a dichotomous Y-maze, two different pairs of compound visual colored cues and a water reward. Results are conclusive for this visuo-spatial regularities study,(Gryllus pennsylvanicus) were able to significantly discriminate between the two compound visual patterns and learned the association with the reinforcer.

Environmental harshness does not affect the propensity for social learning in great tits, Parus major.

According to the harsh environment hypothesis, natural selection should favour cognitive mechanisms to overcome environmental challenges. Tests of this hypothesis to date have largely focused on asocial learning and memory, thus failing to account for the spread of information via social means. Tests in specialized food-hoarding birds have shown strong support for the effects of environmental harshness on both asocial and social learning.

Texas field crickets (Gryllus texensis) use visual cues to place learn but perform poorly when intra- and extra-maze cues conflict.

Central place foraging field crickets are an ideal system for studying the adaptive value of learning and memory, but more research is needed on ecologically relevant cognition in these invertebrates. Here, we test the visuospatial place learning of Texas field crickets (Gryllus texensis) in a radial arm maze. Our study expands previous work on G.

Cognitive flexibility in the wild: Individual differences in reversal learning are explained primarily by proactive interference, not by sampling strategies, in two passerine bird species.

Behavioural flexibility allows animals to adjust to changes in their environment. Although the cognitive processes that explain flexibility have been relatively well studied in psychology, this is less true for animals in the wild. Here we use data collected automatically during self-administered discrimination-learning trials for two passerine species, and during four phases (habituation, initial learning, first reversal and second reversal) in order to decompose sources of consistent among-individual differences in reversal learning, a commonly used measure for cognitive flexibility.

Cognition and covariance in the producer-scrounger game.

The producer-scrounger game is a key element of foraging ecology in many systems. Producing and scrounging typically covary negatively, but partitioning this covariance into contributions of individual plasticity and consistent between individual differences is key to understanding population-level consequences of foraging strategies. Furthermore, little is known about the role cognition plays in the producer-scrounger game.

Great tits who remember more accurately have difficulty forgetting, but variation is not driven by environmental harshness.

The causes of individual variation in memory are poorly understood in wild animals. Harsh environments with sparse or rapidly changing food resources are hypothesized to favour more accurate spatial memory to allow animals to return to previously visited patches when current patches are depleted. A potential cost of more accurate spatial memory is proactive interference, where accurate memories block the formation of new memories.

How general is cognitive ability in non-human animals? A meta-analytical and multi-level reanalysis approach.

General intelligence has been a topic of high interest for over a century. Traditionally, research on general intelligence was based on principal component analyses and other dimensionality reduction approaches. The advent of high-speed computing has provided alternative statistical tools that have been used to test predictions of human general intelligence.

The impact of learning opportunities on the development of learning and decision-making: an experiment with passerine birds.

Developmental context has been shown to influence learning abilities later in life, namely through experiments with nutritional and/or environmental constraints (i.e. lack of enrichment).

Characterizing innovators: Ecological and individual predictors of problem-solving performance.

Behavioural innovation, the use of new behaviours or existing ones in novel contexts, can have important ecological and evolutionary consequences for animals. An understanding of these consequences would be incomplete without considering the traits that predispose certain individuals to exhibit innovative behaviour. Several individual and ecological variables are hypothesized to affect innovativeness, but empirical studies show mixed results.

Food caching in city birds: urbanization and exploration do not predict spatial memory in scatter hoarders.

Urbanization has been shown to affect the physiological, morphological, and behavioral traits of animals, but it is less clear how cognitive traits are affected. Urban habitats contain artificial food sources, such as bird feeders that are known to impact foraging behaviors. As of yet, however, it is not well known whether urbanization and the abundance of supplemental food during the winter affect caching behaviors and spatial memory in scatter hoarders.

Urbanization and the temporal patterns of social networks and group foraging behaviors.

Urbanization causes dramatic and rapid changes to natural environments, which can lead the animals inhabiting these habitats to adjust their behavioral responses. For social animals, urbanized environments may alter group social dynamics through modification of the external environment (e.g.

Energy metabolism and personality in wild-caught fall field crickets.

Standard metabolic rate (SMR) is known to be highly variable across levels of biological organisation (e.g., species, populations, among individuals, within individuals).

Measuring and understanding individual differences in cognition.

Individuals vary in their cognitive performance. While this variation forms the foundation of the study of human psychometrics, its broader importance is only recently being recognized. Explicitly acknowledging this individual variation found in both humans and non-human animals provides a novel opportunity to understand the mechanisms, development and evolution of cognition.

Reduced reproductive performance associated with warmer ambient temperatures during incubation in a winter-breeding, food-storing passerine.

Timing of reproduction can influence individual fitness whereby early breeders tend to have higher reproductive success than late breeders. However, the fitness consequences of timing of breeding may also be influenced by environmental conditions after the commencement of breeding. We tested whether ambient temperatures during the incubation and early nestling periods modulated the effect of laying date on brood size and dominant juvenile survival in gray jays (), a sedentary boreal species whose late winter nesting depends, in part, on caches of perishable food.

Environmental and genetic determinants of innovativeness in a natural population of birds.

Much of the evidence for the idea that individuals differ in their propensity to innovate and solve new problems has come from studies on captive primates. Increasingly, behavioural ecologists are studying innovativeness in wild populations, and uncovering links with functional behaviour and fitness-related traits. The relative importance of genetic and environmental factors in driving this variation, however, remains unknown.

Animal and human innovation: novel problems and novel solutions.

This theme issue explores how and why behavioural innovation occurs, and the consequences of innovation for individuals, groups and populations. A vast literature on human innovation exists, from the development of problem-solving in children, to the evolution of technology, to the cultural systems supporting innovation. A more recent development is a growing literature on animal innovation, which has demonstrated links between innovation and personality traits, cognitive traits, neural measures, changing conditions, and the current state of the social and physical environment.

Taking the Operant Paradigm into the Field: Associative Learning in Wild Great Tits.

Associative learning is essential for resource acquisition, predator avoidance and reproduction in a wide diversity of species, and is therefore a key target for evolutionary and comparative cognition research. Automated operant devices can greatly enhance the study of associative learning and yet their use has been mainly restricted to laboratory conditions. We developed a portable, weatherproof, battery-operated operant device and conducted the first fully automated colour-associative learning experiment using free-ranging individuals in the wild.

The evolution of cognition in natural populations.

Individual differences in cognitive abilities have been described in a range of species, but do they impact survival or reproduction? Several recent studies report links between putative cognitive and reproductive traits in avian systems. Whether or when selection should occur in the wild is becoming an exciting avenue of research.

Studying the evolutionary ecology of cognition in the wild: a review of practical and conceptual challenges.

Cognition is defined as the processes by which animals collect, retain and use information from their environment to guide their behaviour. Thus cognition is essential in a wide range of behaviours, including foraging, avoiding predators and mating. Despite this pivotal role, the evolutionary processes shaping variation in cognitive performance among individuals in wild populations remain very poorly understood.

Experimentally induced innovations lead to persistent culture via conformity in wild birds.

In human societies, cultural norms arise when behaviours are transmitted through social networks via high-fidelity social learning. However, a paucity of experimental studies has meant that there is no comparable understanding of the process by which socially transmitted behaviours might spread and persist in animal populations. Here we show experimental evidence of the establishment of foraging traditions in a wild bird population.

Cognitive ability influences reproductive life history variation in the wild.

Cognition has been studied intensively for several decades, but the evolutionary processes that shape individual variation in cognitive traits remain elusive [1-3]. For instance, the strength of selection on a cognitive trait has never been estimated in a natural population, and the possibility that positive links with life history variation [1-5] are mitigated by costs [6] or confounded by ecological factors remains unexplored in the wild. We assessed novel problem-solving performance in 468 wild great tits Parus major temporarily taken into captivity and subsequently followed up their reproductive performance in the wild.

Larger groups of passerines are more efficient problem solvers in the wild.

Group living commonly helps organisms face challenging environmental conditions. Although a known phenomenon in humans, recent findings suggest that a benefit of group living in animals generally might be increased innovative problem-solving efficiency. This benefit has never been demonstrated in a natural context, however, and the mechanisms underlying improved efficiency are largely unknown.

Individual differences in plasticity and sampling when playing behavioural games.

When engaged in behavioural games, animals can adjust their use of alternative tactics until groups reach stable equilibria. Recent theory on behavioural plasticity in games predicts that individuals should differ in their plasticity or responsiveness and hence in their degree of behavioural adjustment. Moreover, individuals are predicted to be consistent in their plasticity within and across biological contexts.

Learning in a game context: strategy choice by some keeps learning from evolving in others.

Behavioural decisions in a social context commonly have frequency-dependent outcomes and so require analysis using evolutionary game theory. Learning provides a mechanism for tracking changing conditions and it has frequently been predicted to supplant fixed behaviour in shifting environments; yet few studies have examined the evolution of learning specifically in a game-theoretic context. We present a model that examines the evolution of learning in a frequency-dependent context created by a producer-scrounger game, where producers search for their own resources and scroungers usurp the discoveries of producers.

Flexible expression of a food-processing behaviour: determinants of dunking rates in wild Carib grackles of Barbados.

Dunking, the softening of dry food in water to speed up consumption time, is normally a very rare behaviour in wild Carib grackles (Quiscalus lugubris) of Barbados. Its frequency can be experimentally increased when large numbers of dry items are repeatedly placed near a standing source of water in conditions that minimize intraspecific competition and risk of theft. To reconcile the normally low frequency of the behaviour in the wild with the high rates obtained in previous experiments, we tested three conditions where dunking varied between 0 and 70%.