Animals can learn about the value of resources and predation risk by exploring novel environments or exploring novel stimuli in their regular environments. Still, there is a disconnect in the way that exploration has been defined and measured; exploration is defined in terms of information acquisition, while measured in terms of movement speed and diversity of contacted items in a novel environment. If exploration is indeed a measurement of information gathering, fast explorers should seek to reduce uncertainty about their environment more than slow explorers. Exploration speed has also been linked to behavioral plasticity, where fast explorers move fast but collect less detailed information, thereby forming routines and expressing less plasticity than slow explorers. We test these two hypotheses by comparing exploration in a novel environment to individuals' attraction to novelty and behavioral plasticity. Our results support the view that exploration is a measurement of information‐gathering tendencies as fast explorers were more likely to collect novel information, which should reduce uncertainty further than sampling familiar information sources, compared with slower explorers. Furthermore, faster explorers switched to sampling novel information more quickly than slow explorers when the value of the familiar option decreased, opposing the widely held view that faster explorers present more routine‐like behavior. By providing familiar and novel foraging options in close spatial contiguity, we demonstrate an attraction to novelty in faster explorers that cannot be confounded by activity rate, thereby suggesting that these individuals seek to reduce uncertainty. In conclusion, our results support the biological validity of the term “exploration” through its association with information gathering.

Developmental context has been shown to influence learning abilities later in life, namely through experiments with nutritional and/or environmental constraints (i.e. lack of enrichment). However, little is known about the extent to which opportunities for learning affect the development of animal cognition, even though such opportunities are known to influence human cognitive development. We exposed young zebra finches ( Taenopygia guttata ) ( n = 26) to one of three experimental conditions, i.e. an environment where (i) colour cues reliably predicted the presence of food (associative learning), (ii) a combination of two-colour cues reliably predicted the presence of food (conditional learning), or (iii) colour cues were non-informative (control). After conducting two different discrimination tasks, our results showed that experience with predictive cues can cause increased choice accuracy and decision-making speed. Our first learning task showed that individuals in the associative learning treatment outperformed the control treatment, while task 2 showed that individuals in the conditional learning treatment had shorter latencies when making choices compared with the control treatment. We found no support for a speed–accuracy trade-off. This dataset provides a rare longitudinal and experimental examination of the effect of predictive versus non-predictive cues during development on the cognition of adult animals. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals’.

Neophobia, defined as the fear of novelty, can be exhibited when individuals encounter unfamiliar stimuli in their environment. Neophobia has been shown to both increase and decrease when individuals are with conspecifics. An increase in latency to contact new objects can be explained by the negotiation hypothesis, which proposes that individuals in groups will negotiate who will approach novelty first, thereby delaying the first contact. This negotiation process could co-occur with and mask a potential effect of risk dilution, where individuals in groups should approach novel objects faster due to lower perceived risk in a social than non-social context. Here, we aimed to test the risk dilution hypothesis using an experimental set-up that precluded negotiation among group members by physically separating dyads during social trials.We presented zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) with different novel objects in both social and non-social contexts. We also repeated the presentation of each object to investigate, for the first time to our knowledge, the effect of social context on the change in neophobia over repeated encounters (i.e., habituation). We found that social context increased the latency to approach a novel object upon first presentation of objects (i.e., increased neophobia), but these latencies decreased faster over repeated presentations of the objects (i.e., faster habituation) compared to the non-social context. These results do not provide support for the risk dilution hypothesis regarding first encounters with objects (neophobia) but seem to support it over repeated object presentations (habituation). This suggests that the effect of social context is different on neophobia and habituation, possibly because they recruit different cognitive mechanisms. Future studies should investigate the impact of ecological and social conditions on decision-making upon first versus subsequent encounters with a novel object in social animals, as both processes can impact fitness costs and benefits of novelty responses.

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