Selective contribution of the telencephalic arcopallium to the social facilitation of foraging efforts in the domestic chick

Abstract

To investigate the neural basis of socio-economic behaviors in birds, we examined the effects of bilateral electrolytic lesions of arcopallium (Arco, the major descending pallial area of the avian telencephalon) and the surrounding nuclei in domestic chicks. We tested foraging effort (running distance) in an I-shaped maze with two food patches that delivered food in a biased manner according to a variable interval schedule. Normally, chicks run back and forth between the patches, and the patch use time matches the respective food delivery rate. In the paired phase, even without actual interference of food, chicks showed social facilitation of running effort compared with the single phase. Chicks with lesions in the Arco and lateral Arco showed significant reductions in social facilitation. The lesion effects of the lateral Arco were particularly selective, as it was not accompanied by changes in running distance in the single phase. Lesions of the nidopallium and nucleus taeniae of the amygdala produced no changes in foraging behavior. On the other hand, the Arco lesion did not impair social facilitation of operant peck latency. In accordance with this, anterograde tracing revealed characteristic projections from the lateral Arco to the extended amygdala, hippocampus, and septum, as well as wide areas of limbic nuclei in the hypothalamus and medial areas of the striatum including the nucleus accumbens. Pathways from the lateral Arco could enable chicks to overcome the extra effort investment of social foraging, suggesting functional and anatomical analogies to the anterior cingulate cortex and basolateral amygdala in mammals.

Avian brains: Insights from development, behaviors and evolution

“…Single NCL neurons recorded from the pigeons performing this choice task showed interesting activities: neurons exhibited more activation for the larger amounts of food delivery but less activation for the longer time taken to the food delivery. Such response profiles of NCL neurons suggest the role of the NCL to calculate the value of the forthcoming reward by integrating distributed information of the amount and the delay in other pallial and/or subpallial nuclei (Izawa et al 2005;Aoki et al 2006;Xin et al 2016).…”

Molecular architecture of the zebra finch arcopallium

“…As such, the arcopallium represents a major output structure through which cortical‐like processing circuits are capable of modulating sensory and motor pathways as well as the expression of various behaviors. Accordingly, lesions or inactivation of different regions of the avian arcopallium can have a wide range of effects on behaviors like song learning and production (Heaton & Brauth, ; Mandelblat‐Cerf et al, ; Nottebohm, Stokes, & Leonard, ), reproductive behavior (Absil, Braquenier, Balthazart, & Ball, ; Thompson, Goodson, Ruscio, & Adkins‐Regan, ), foraging (Xin, Ogura, Uno, & Matsushima, ), fear conditioning (Saint‐Dizier et al, ), and affective behavior (Cheng et al, ) among others.…”

Ecological Validity of Impulsive Choice: Consequences of Profitability-Based Short-Sighted Evaluation in the Producer-Scrounger Resource Competition

“…In accord with the social impulsivity, visual perception of a competitor suppressed the neuronal representation of predicted rewards in the basal ganglia [6,40]. The social facilitation also has neural substrates in the limbic pallium [29,41]. Lesions to the nucleus accumbens made chicks impulsive [5] just as the competitive training did [30].…”

“…Pecking food is also facilitated by companion's pecking (local enhancement), but the facilitated pecking is not causally linked with the facilitated running. Chicks run for other's run, and peck for other's peck, but these two types of facilitation are separate processes [29]. P is located closer to F (at distance d > 0) than S is, and S is at distance δ > 0 from P. The time required for each player's decision is short and therefore ignored.…”

“…Even in such an uncertain context, chicks allocated the residence time at the two feeders according to the relative gain rate as would be expected by the Herrnstein's matching law in psychology [34] and the ideal free distribution in ecology [35]. When two chicks were placed in the maze (social context), they immediately ran more than in the single context, and the runs were highly synchronized [28,29]. The social facilitation [36] was accompanied by a precise matching to the reinforcement ratio [37].…”