Nutritional deficits during early development affect hippocampal structure and spatial memory later in life.

Abstract

Development rates vary among individuals, often as a result of direct competition for food. Survival of young might depend on their learning abilities, but it remains unclear whether learning abilities are affected by nutrition during development. The authors demonstrated that compared with controls, 1-year-old Western scrub jays (Aphelocoma californica) that experienced nutritional deficits during early posthatching development had smaller hippocampi with fewer neurons and performed worse in a cache recovery task and in a spatial version of an associative learning task. In contrast, performance of nutritionally deprived birds was similar to that of controls in 2 color versions of an associative learning task. These findings suggest that nutritional deficits during early development have long-term consequences for hippocampal structure and spatial memory, which, in turn, are likely to have a strong impact on animals' future fitness.

Energetic cost of learning and memory can cause cognitive impairment in honeybees

“…This shows that while sociality can potentially mitigate the effect of nutritional stress on cognition by changing resource allocation within the colony [8], we see the same kind of costs and tradeoffs related to cognitive functions in individual bees as is seen in solitary animals [4][5][6][7]. Our result showing that the learning performance of satiated immune-challenged bees is substantially higher than starved immune-challenged bees but is similar to starved control bees suggests that nutritional compromise might be a primary underlying mechanism for the cognitive impairment seen in diseased animals [17].…”

“…All biological processes require energy, and even cognitive functions such as learning and memory, which are generally discussed only with respect to their benefits, have energetic costs [1][2][3], which can either lead to their tradeoffs with other functions [4,5] or to impaired cognition, when energy is limited [6,7]. In social animals, however, the negative effects of energetic stress on the cognitive ability of an individual can potentially be mitigated by changes in resource allocation patterns at the group level.…”

Development of allocentric spatial memory abilities in children from 18 months to 5 years of age

“…with their real performance on the task. This exploratory behavior is observed across species, including birds (Pravosudov, Lavenex, & Omanska, 2005), rodents (Lavenex & Schenk, 1995, 1997, 1998, monkeys Lavenex et al, 2007) and humans .…”

The effect of food quality during growth on spatial memory consolidation in adult pigeons

“…This investment might have come with costs such as reduced life span or reproductive output, which we did not consider. Previous studies in other bird species found that a deficit in the nutritive value of the food given to nestlings impaired cognitive processes at adulthood (Arnold et al, 2007;Bonaparte et al, 2011;Pravosudov et al, 2005). Another study in zebra finches found that post-fledging nutritional stress enhanced performance in an associative learning task (Kriengwatana et al, 2015).…”

“…A previous study in western scrub jays (Aphelocoma californica) has shown that diet restriction to 65% of ad libitum food, a level commonly observed in wild birds during early posthatching development, impairs spatial memory in foraging tasks at adulthood (Pravosudov et al, 2005). It is not only the amount of food, but the type of diet that matters.…”