Specializations in cognition generalize across contexts: cowbirds are consistent in nest prospecting and foraging tasks

Davies, Hayden B.; White, David J.

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2018.07.019

Cited by 10 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…It is important to note that our hypothesis and interpretation, as well as that of Guigueno et al (2014), assume that food location tasks recruit similar cognitive mechanism as that used for remembering the location of host nests. This assumption is supported by a study of Davies and White (2018) that shows consistency in performance in brown-headed cowbirds females across nest-prospecting and foraging tasks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Sex differences in the use of spatial cues in two avian brood parasites

2020

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Shiny and screaming cowbirds are avian interspecific brood parasites that locate and prospect host nests in daylight and return from one to several days later to lay an egg during the pre-dawn twilight. Thus, during nest location and prospecting, both location information and visual features are available, but the latter become less salient in the low-light conditions when the nests are visited for laying. This raises the question of how these different sources of information interact, and whether this reflects different behavioural specializations across sexes. Differences are expected, because in shiny cowbirds, females act alone, but in screaming cowbirds, both sexes make exploratory and laying nest visits together. We trained females and males of shiny and screaming cowbird to locate a food source signalled by both colour and position (cues associated), and evaluated performance after displacing the colour cue to make it misleading (cues dissociated). There were no sex or species differences in acquisition performance while the cues were associated. When the colour cue was relocated, individuals of both sexes and species located the food source making fewer visits to non-baited wells than expected by chance, indicating that they all retained the position as an informative cue. In this phase, however, shiny cowbird females, but not screaming, outperformed conspecific males, visiting fewer non-baited wells before finding the food location and making straighter paths in the search. These results are consistent with a greater reliance on spatial memory, as expected from the shiny cowbird female's specialization on nest location behaviour.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Sex differences in the use of spatial cues in two avian brood parasites

2020

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“…Cowbirds are brood parasites, often opting to lay their eggs in the nest of an unsuspecting host bird. Females determine the most economical decision, reliance on social or personal information, depending on the context and their present status (Davies & White, 2018). Successful nest prospecting generally correlates with foraging success in individuals that show a reliance on personal information, whereas those that do not exhibit the same level of individual success should resort to social information to maintain a competitive edge in nest prospecting.…”

Section: Generalizing From Others' Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Successful nest prospecting generally correlates with foraging success in individuals that show a reliance on personal information, whereas those that do not exhibit the same level of individual success should resort to social information to maintain a competitive edge in nest prospecting. In a systematic examination of this pattern of behaviors, Davies and White (2018) found that the degree to which female cowbirds relied on social information was inverse to the amount of personal information they had previously accrued. Researchers found that it was not a lack of attention to social information that dictated individual's use of such information but rather the active decision as to what sources of information they relied upon in different contexts.…”

Section: Generalizing From Others' Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

It's Hard to Be Social Alone: Cognitive Complexity as Transfer Within and Across Domains

Vonk¹,

Vincent²,

O’Connor³

2021

CCBR

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The field of comparative cognition is intent on demarcating cognition into social and physical domains; however, we argue that it is not useful to differentiate between cognitive processes involving social versus physical (nonsocial) phenomena. We argue that similar cognitive mechanisms underly reasoning about social and physical information and that it is transfer of knowledge and skills within and across these "domains" that is most informative with regard to identifying cognitive flexibility. We argue that social complexity, typically defined as group size, although important, has no special influence over the evolution of social cognition. Likewise, foraging complexity, typically conceptualized as dietary breadth, extractive foraging, and patchy food distribution, has no special influence over the evolution of physical cognition. Instead, researchers should treat social and foraging complexity as continuous rather than dichotomous variables that interact with one another and with environmental unpredictability to predict domain-general cognition that can be applied flexibly across novel features, contexts, and experiences. To answer long-standing questions about the selection pressures for cognition, researchers must consider species that differ in various aspects of their ecology on analogous tasks within and across domains.

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“…Also, there were too few subjects that completed both the spatial and the numerical discrimination tasks who moved to the FARM (four males, two females) to permit separate comparisons for these tasks. Past work on nest prospecting has suggested that these two cognitive skills (space and number discrimination) may be linked (Davies & White, 2018;White et al, 2009White et al, , 2017.…”

Section: Cognitive Performance At Afarmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…White and colleagues have studied the cognitive processes that female cowbirds use when prospecting for nests in aviaries (Davies & White, 2018;White, 2019;White et al, 2007aWhite et al, , b, 2009White et al, 2017). This work has revealed that females are extremely adept at finding nests, and once found, select among nests based on size, pattern, and the number of eggs present.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognition and reproductive success in cowbirds

et al. 2021

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Understanding the relationships between cognitive abilities and fitness is integral to an evolutionary study of brain and behavior. However, these relationships are often difficult to measure and detect. Here we draw upon an opportunistic sample of brown-headed cowbird (Molothrus ater) subjects that had two separate research experiences: First, they engaged in a large series of cognitive tests in David Sherry’s Lab in the Advanced Facility for Avian Research (AFAR) at Western University, then subsequently moved to the Field Avian Research Megalab (FARM) at Wilfrid Laurier University where they lived in large breeding flocks in aviaries with other wild-caught cowbirds. Thus, we had extensive measures of cognitive abilities, breeding behavior, and reproductive success for these birds. We report here, for the fist time, the surprisingly strong connections we found among these different measures. Female cowbirds’ spatial cognitive abilities correlated positively with how intensely they were courted by males, and with their overall egg production. Males’ spatial cognition correlated positively with their ability to engage in singing contests (“countersinging”) with other males. In addition, a separate non-spatial cognitive ability correlated positively with the attractiveness of the songs they sung. In sum, these results suggest the cognitive skills assessed in the lab were strongly connected to breeding behavior and reproductive success. Moreover, since certain cognitive abilities related to different aspects of breeding success, it suggests that cognitive modules may have specialized adaptive value, but also that these specialized skills may interact and influence fitness in surprising ways.

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Specializations in cognition generalize across contexts: cowbirds are consistent in nest prospecting and foraging tasks

Cited by 10 publications

References 20 publications

Sex differences in the use of spatial cues in two avian brood parasites

Sex differences in the use of spatial cues in two avian brood parasites

It's Hard to Be Social Alone: Cognitive Complexity as Transfer Within and Across Domains

Cognition and reproductive success in cowbirds

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