Facilitative effects of social partners on Java sparrow activity

Abstract

Group-living animals can affect each other's behaviour, causing changes in the rate or type of behaviours performed (social facilitation), or convergence in behaviour to that displayed by the majority of neighbours (social conformity). Facilitation and conformity effects can act to reduce direct competition and/or enable social coordination, and the degree to which individuals can affect each other's behaviour can depend upon the identities and traits of those interacting. To investigate the effect of social partners on individual behaviour, we studied the activity of Java sparrows (Lonchura oryzivora) in three contexts (alone, in the presence of three males, or in the presence of three females) and in two conditions (novel environment and novel object tests). A significant proportion of variation in bird activity across trials was attributed to variation among individuals, indicating a personality trait. However, activity varied systematically according to whether birds were tested alone or in the presence of companions. We found that irrespective of the focal bird's sex, individuals were more active in a social context compared to when alone, and this effect was greatest when focal birds were in the presence of male companions. Overall, our findings demonstrate facilitative effects of social partners on Java sparrow activity, and the magnitude of this effect depends on the sex of companions. These results therefore support the hypothesis that social isolation causes behavioural inhibition (which may be caused by increased perception of risk), and future studies should carefully assess the ecological and evolutionary consequences for the emergence of social facilitation, inhibition or conformity across different species and contexts.

“Micropersonality” traits and their implications for behavioral and movement ecology research

“…Indeed, for researchers interested in “higher order” group‐ and population‐level behaviors, it is necessary to incorporate such individual‐level variation into their studies (King et al., 2018). However, where individual‐level data are collected in isolation (i.e., solitary individuals) we urge caution using these data to build data‐ or theory‐driven movement models, since variation in the social environment can profoundly alter the expression of movement and behavior (e.g., Fürtbauer & Fry, 2018; Herbert‐Read et al., 2013; King et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2020), and this poses a new challenge for researchers in both areas. In short, the two research areas should continue to collaborate to advance their respective and combined fields of research.…”

No, you go first: phenotype and social context affect house sparrow neophobia

“…We highlight these validations because neophobia experiments sometimes lack multiple novel object or control trials, which can make results difficult to interpret [33]. Matched-phenotype pairing indicated a marginal negative effect ( p = 0.07) of having a cage mate on feeding likelihood in the presence of a novel object (congruent with [13,17,19,21,39] but see [14,16]). This is not an effect of competition to feed because this was not observed during control trials (no object).…”

“…Novel object trials are commonly used to evaluate social effects on individual exploratory behaviour in many taxa, including fish [9][10][11], mammals [12,13] and birds [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. In a social environment, fish [10,11] and birds [14,19,22] generally behave more similarly to other animals in that environment (social conformity hypothesis [23]) rather than emphasizing individual differences to reduce competition and increase social coordination (social facilitation hypothesis [24]).…”

Slow-Exploring Java Sparrows Lonchura oryzivora Hold Higher Reversal Learning Ability

“…To investigate the relationships between personality and multiple cognitive abilities, we measured the exploratory behaviour in Java Sparrows Lonchura oryzivora , a highly social passerine species with small body size (Islam 1997). Java Sparrow, traditionally domesticated as pets, could well adapt the laboratory environment and have been used as study objects in several behavioural studies (Furutani et al 2018, Umemoto et al 2019, Zhang et al 2020, Wang et al 2022, Chen et al 2023). A series of cognitive tasks, including a colour association task, a colour reversal task, and a detour-reaching task, were used to quantify the capacity for discrimination learning, reversal learning, and inhibitory control.…”