Multiple factors affect discrimination learning performance, but not between-individual variation, in wild mixed-species flocks of birds.

ABSTRACT: Cognition arguably drives most behaviours in animals, but whether and why individuals in the wild vary consistently in their cognitive performance is scarcely known, especially under mixed-species scenarios. One reason for this is that quantifying the relative importance of individual, contextual, ecological and social factors remains a major challenge. We examined how many of these factors, and sources of bias, affected participation and performance, in an initial discrimination learning experiment and two reversal learning experiments during self-administered trials in a population of great tits and blue tits. Individuals were randomly allocated to different rewarding feeders within an array. Participation was high and only weakly affected by age and species. In the initial learning expe

SUBMITTER: Reichert MS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7211855 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature