Food-caching mountain chickadees learn abstract rule to solve spatial-temporal task

Published: 6 March 2023| Version 1 | DOI: 10.17632/txk2vp6657.1
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Description

Cognitive task description: In winter 2021-2022, we tested wild, food-caching mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli) in their natural environment on a novel spatial-temporal task to test whether chickadees could learn and use an abstract rule while making foraging decisions in a complex spatial-temporal task. In this task, chickadees had to learn to track the daily location of a food reward that moved predictably around a square spatial array of eight feeders. Each day, only one of eight feeder locations provided food to each bird. Each night, the food reward was rotated either clockwise or counterclockwise to the nearest feeder in that direction, so that the following day birds had to find their new rewarding feeder. The food reward was rotated every day in the same direction for each bird for up to 34 days. Hypotheses: The design of this spatial-temporal task allowed us to discriminate between two different processes that birds could use to solve the task. First, if birds relied on associative learning, they would be expected to use memory recency to visit the most recently rewarding feeder, even after the food reward rotated each day. In this case, birds using associative learning and memory should first visit the old rewarding feeder from the previous day, then continue to search by moving backwards to the locations that they remembered recently provided food. Alternatively, if birds learned the rule of the spatial-temporal rotation, they should search for the new rewarding feeder by moving forward toward the correct rewarding feeder and away from the previously rewarding feeders. This second method represents using an abstract rule: birds must learn that the food reward is located one position to the left (or right) of the most recently rewarding feeder. They must apply this learned relationship to new feeders, as the rewarding feeder location continues to rotate around the feeder array each day. We conducted two additional cognitive tasks prior to the spatial-temporal task to assess the role of individual cognitive ability in learning an abstract rule. Using the same spatial feeder apparatus, we tested individual spatial learning and memory ability and single reversal learning ability, often used to estimate cognitive flexibility. We found evidence that chickadees learned and used the abstract direction rule to search for the food reward. This may be the first evidence of abstract rule use in a wild bird in natural conditions.

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Steps to reproduce

The study was conducted during the winter of 2021-2022 as part of an ongoing, long-term study of mountain chickadees in the Sierra Nevada mountains ca. 10 km north of Truckee, CA, USA (started in 2014 at Sagehen Experimental Forest, Sagehen Creek Field Station, University of California Berkeley. Visit data were collected automatically from 'smart' feeders equipped with RadioFrequency Identification technology to detect birds banded with Passive Integrated Transponder Tags. Every visit recorded the tag ID, location, date, and time of the visit. Other research efforts in this system provided demographic information for PIT-tagged birds. The visit record was used to generate summaries by trial. Each trial began when a bird visited the feeder array and ended when it gained a food reward from one of the feeders (black oil sunflower seeds). Chickadees forage for seeds one at a time so each visit is associated with one food reward and one foraging attempt. One directory contains data and one directory contains scripts for the data processing and analyses.

Institutions

University of Nevada Reno

Categories

Animal Behavior, Animal Cognition, Spatial Learning, Spatial Memory

Funding

Division of Integrative Organismal Systems

IOS1856181

Division of Integrative Organismal Systems

IOS2119824

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program

2020305313

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program

2019287870

Licence