Eurasian jays predict the food preferences of their mates

Kamil, Alan C.

doi:10.1073/pnas.1300515110

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 14 publications

(15 reference statements)

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“…The flexibility in the male's behavioral respose to the same perceptual cue could be shown if the male exhibited a sensitivity to how much food the female has eaten and thus the degree of specific satiety she is experiencing, or a sensitivity to what food the female prefers , for instance after seeing the female choose between 2 available food sources. 16 …”

Section: Behavioral Rulesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Desire-state attribution: Benefits of a novel paradigm using the food-sharing behavior of Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius)

Ostojić

Cheke

Shaw

et al. 2016

Communicative & Integrative Biology

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In recent years, we have investigated the possibility that Eurasian jay food sharing might rely on desire-state attribution. The female's desire for a particular type of food can be decreased by sating her on it (specific satiety) and the food sharing paradigm can be used to test whether the male's sharing pattern reflects the female's current desire. Our previous findings show that the male shares the food that the female currently wants. Here, we consider 3 simpler mechanisms that might explain the male's behavior: behavior reading, lack of self-other differentiation and behavioral rules. We illustrate how we have already addressed these issues and how our food sharing paradigm can be further adapted to answer outstanding questions. The flexibility with which the food sharing paradigm can be applied to rule out alternative mechanisms makes it a useful tool to study desire-state attribution in jays and other species that share food.

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Section: Behavioral Rulesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Desire-state attribution: Benefits of a novel paradigm using the food-sharing behavior of Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius)

Ostojić

Cheke

Shaw

et al. 2016

Communicative & Integrative Biology

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“…While the current findings rule out the possibility that the male jay relies on ‘stimulus‐bound behavior reading’, further tests are necessary to test for other behavior reading explanations of the jay's behavior. The male's behavior could be based on him having observed a particular behavior exhibited by his partner during the feeding phase of the experiment, for instance the male might be reliant on observing his partner reject the food that she is sated on . This could be tested by comparing the male's response to his partner's food rejection behavior with her response when the female is given just enough food to be sated such that she rejects no food at all.…”

Section: Mental‐state Attributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The male's behavior could be based on him having observed a particular behavior exhibited by his partner during the feeding phase of the experiment, for instance the male might be reliant on observing his partner reject the food that she is sated on. 87 This could be tested by comparing the male's response to his partner's food rejection behavior with her response when the female is given just enough food to be sated such that she rejects no food at all. It would also be possible to present a scenario where the male does not actually see his partner's eating behavior but instead has to infer what his partner has eaten from seeing what food was initially provided to her.…”

Section: Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food sharing and social cognition

Legg

Ostojić

Clayton

2014

WIRES Cognitive Science

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Many non-human animals share food with each other, with kin, mates, and other unrelated individuals. When individuals share food with others they lose a valuable resource. Thus, traditionally much research has investigated how this behavior can be an evolutionarily stable strategy. Only recently has food-sharing behavior been exploited to investigate non-human cognition. Certain evolutionarily stable strategies that have been proposed as accounts for food-sharing behaviors, such as reciprocity and interchange, may rely on complex cognitive abilities. In these cases, individuals may calculate the benefit they may receive from sharing with the recipient. In some species, sharing of food can facilitate the recipients' rate and extent of learning. This form of teaching may be cognitively complex if the donor takes into account the level of the recipient's abilities. In addition, an animal's food-sharing behavior, which in itself may be based on a simple cognitive mechanism, could be used as a tool to investigate the extent to which the individual may be capable of complex cognitive abilities, for example, mental-state attribution. These three areas of research, reciprocity, teaching, and mental-state attribution, illustrate how food-sharing behavior can be used as a valuable natural behavior to investigate cognition in non-human animals.

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“…Importantly, when males did not see the female during pre-feeding and her behaviour at the time of sharing was the only information available, they did not modulate their sharing pattern appropriately. Thus, males were not simply using ‘stimulus-bound behaviour reading’ [ 6 ]; their sharing pattern was not a response to the female's behaviour during the test phase that could have signalled what food she wanted to be fed [ 7 ]. Instead, males required the information about what caused the change in the female's desire for a food (i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, it was shown that the males' own motivation was not influenced by what the female had eaten; when there was no possibility to share with the female, the males' choices for themselves did not follow the pattern shown in their sharing behaviour [ 5 ]. Thus, the males' sharing behaviour was a response to their partner's desire, rather than their own, suggesting that the males' decisions about what to choose for themselves and what to choose for another individual are distinct [ 7 ]. In the original study, the males' desire was neutral towards the test foods and held constant across trials by always pre-feeding them maintenance diet (MD).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can male Eurasian jays disengage from their own current desire to feed the female what she wants?

et al. 2014

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Humans' predictions of another person's behaviour are regularly influenced by what they themselves might know or want. In a previous study, we found that male Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) could cater for their female partner's current desire when sharing food with her. Here, we tested the extent to which the males' decisions are influenced by their own current desire. When the males' and female's desires matched, males correctly shared the food that was desired by both. When the female's desire differed from their own, the males' decisions were not entirely driven by their own desires, suggesting that males also took the female's desire into account. Thus, the male jays' decisions about their mates' desires are partially biased by their own desire and might be based upon similar processes as those found in humans.

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Eurasian jays predict the food preferences of their mates

Cited by 3 publications

References 14 publications

Desire-state attribution: Benefits of a novel paradigm using the food-sharing behavior of Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius)

Desire-state attribution: Benefits of a novel paradigm using the food-sharing behavior of Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius)

Food sharing and social cognition

Can male Eurasian jays disengage from their own current desire to feed the female what she wants?

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