Social experience with siblings fosters species specific responsiveness to maternal visual cues in bobwhite quail chicks (Colinus virginianus).

Abstract

We examined the role of visual and social experience with siblings in the development of bobwhite quail (Colinus virginianus) chicks' preference for species-specific maternal visual cues. Chicks were reared in 1 of 4 conditions: group, isolation, partial isolation, and heterospecific group. They were tested in simultaneous choice tests with species-typical and species-atypical audiovisual stimuli. Results revealed that only subjects that were reared in a group with same-aged conspecifics preferred the visual features of a bobwhite hen model. Subjects in the other 3 conditions did not exhibit species-specific visual preference. The findings suggest that visual experience and direct social interaction with siblings facilitate the development of bobwhite chicks' species-specific responsiveness to static maternal visual cues and illustrate the important influence of experience with conspecifics in the development of early perceptual preferences.

Specific postnatal auditory stimulation interferes with species‐typical visual responsiveness in bobwhite quail chicks

“…These results parallel the results of previous studies (Lickliter & Virkar, 1989;McBride & Lickliter, 1993) demonstrating naive chicks' abilities to utilize maternal visual cues by 72 hr following hatching and provides the necessary control group for the subsequent experiments of this study.…”

“…These findings are consistent with previous observations which revealed that unstimulated, group-reared bobwhite quail chicks do not typically emit distress vocalizations (McBride & Lickliter, 1993). These findings are also consistent with previous findings obtained from ducklings (Gaioni & Platte, 1982), in which ducklings were found to attend to other ducklings' distress vocalizations and alternately respond with their own distress calls.…”

“…Specifically, chicks were exposed to recordings of bobwhite hatchling distress calls during the first 3 days following hatching. Unlike bobwhite contentment calls, this type of vocalization is not typically present in socially reared bobwhite chicks' posthatch environment (McBride & Lickliter, 1993).…”

“…In a similar vein, McBride and Lickliter (1993) found that partially isolated bobwhite chicks (i.e., chicks had the opportunity to see one sibling through a glass divider) frequently emit distress calls during the first 72 hr following hatching. Furthermore, partially isolated chicks do not exhibit species-typical visual responsiveness for the bobwhite hen at 72 hr of age, paralleling the results of Experiment 3 .…”

Augmented prenatal tactile and vestibular stimulation alters postnatal auditory and visual responsiveness in bobwhite quail chicks

“…These results differ markedly from those obtained from unmanipulated bobwhite chicks in previous studies utilizing identical testing procedures. In these studies, control chicks reliably preferred the species-typical bobwhite hen over the scaled quail hen by 72 hr of postnatal age (Banker & Lickliter, 1993;Lickliter, 1990Lickliter, , 1994Lickliter & Virkar, 1989;McBride & Lickliter, 1993). In the present study, chicks exposed to augmented prenatal tactile and vestibular stimulation did not prefer the bobwhite hen over the scaled quail hen, even by 120 hr of age, indicating that the onset of chicks' visual responsiveness to maternal cues is compromised as a result of augmented prenatal proximal sensory stimulation.…”