No evidence for cross-contextual consistency in spatial cognition or behavioral flexibility in a passerine

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dc.contributor.authorTroisi, Camille A.
dc.contributor.authorCooke, Amy C.
dc.contributor.authorDavidson, Gabrielle L.
dc.contributor.authorde la Hera, Iván
dc.contributor.authorReichert, Michael S.
dc.contributor.authorQuinn, John L.
dc.contributor.funderEuropean Research Councilen
dc.contributor.funderHorizon 2020en
dc.contributor.funderScience Foundation Irelanden
dc.date.accessioned2021-09-01T14:22:16Z
dc.date.available2021-09-01T14:22:16Z
dc.date.issued2020-08
dc.date.updated2021-09-01T12:51:39Z
dc.description.abstractAlthough the evolution of cognitive differences among species has long been of interest in ecology, whether natural selection acts on cognitive processes within populations has only begun to receive similar attention. One of the key challenges is to understand how consistently cognitive traits within any one domain are expressed over time and across different contexts, as this has direct implications for the way in which selection might act on this variation. Animal studies typically measure a cognitive domain using only one task in one context and assume that this captures the likely expression of that domain in different contexts. This use of limited and restricted measures is not surprising because, from an ecologist’s perspective, cognitive tasks are laborious to employ, and if the measure requires learning a particular aspect of the task (e.g., reward type, cue availability, scale of testing), then it is difficult to repeat the task as the learning is context specific. Thus, our knowledge of whether individual differences in cognitive abilities are consistent across contexts is limited, and current evidence suggests that consistency is weak. We tested up to 32 wild great tits (Parus major) to characterize the consistency of two cognitive abilities, each in two different contexts: 1) spatial cognition at two different spatial scales, and 2) behavioral flexibility as performance in a detour reaching task and reversal learning in a spatial task. We found no evidence of a correlation between individuals’ performance in two measures of spatial cognition or two measures of behavioral flexibility. This suggests that cognitive performance is highly plastic and sensitive to differences across tasks, that variants of these well-known tasks may tap into different combinations of both cognitive and non-cognitive mechanisms, or that the tasks simply do not adequately measure each putative cognitive domain. Our results highlight the challenges of developing standardized cognitive assays to explain natural behavior and to understand the selective consequences of that variation.en
dc.description.statusPeer revieweden
dc.description.versionPublished Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationTroisi, C. A., Cooke, A. C., Davidson, G. L, de la Hera, I., Reichert, M. S., & Quinn, J. L. (2021). No evidence for cross-contextual consistency in spatial cognition or behavioral flexibility in a passerine. Animal Behavior and Cognition, 8(3), pp. 446-461. doi: 10.26451/abc.08.03.08.2021en
dc.identifier.endpage461en
dc.identifier.issn2372-5052
dc.identifier.issued3en
dc.identifier.journaltitleAnimalen
dc.identifier.startpage446en
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/11817
dc.identifier.volume8en
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherAnimal Behavior and Cognitionen
dc.relation.projectinfo:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/FP7::SP2::ERC/617509/EU/The evolutionary ecology of cognition across a heterogeneous landscape/EVOLECOCOGen
dc.relation.projectinfo:eu-repo/grantAgreement/SFI/SFI ERC Support Programme/14/ERC/B3118/IE/SFI ERC Support - John Quinn/en
dc.relation.urihttps://www.animalbehaviorandcognition.org/article.php?id=1282
dc.rights© 2020 the authors. Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)en
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/en
dc.subjectCognitionen
dc.subjectSpatial cognitionen
dc.subjectInhibitory controlen
dc.subjectGreat titsen
dc.subjectConsistencyen
dc.subjectRepeatabilityen
dc.titleNo evidence for cross-contextual consistency in spatial cognition or behavioral flexibility in a passerineen
dc.typeArticle (peer-reviewed)en
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