Reaction to novelty as a behavioral assay of recognition memory in homing pigeons and Japanese quail

Abstract

Spontaneous novelty preference is apparent in a wide array of animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish. This provides a powerful behavioral assay to assess whether an animal can recognize a diverse array of stimuli in a common paradigm. Surprisingly, no research has been conducted in birds using novelty approach under conditions comparable to the spontaneous object recognition (SOR) protocols that have become standard across other animals. To correct this, the current study adapts a number of SOR protocols commonly used in mammals to characterize novelty approach in Silver King pigeons and Japanese quail. We show that, in general, both quail and pigeons readily approach novel objects or locations when tested using SOR protocols, although pigeons show a neophilic response under some conditions in which quail do not. Neither quail nor pigeons readily approach objects in novel contexts or novel locations. These data show that SOR can be successfully adapted to birds, allowing for more direct comparison between mammals and birds in tasks of shared ecological relevance.

Experience-Dependent Egr1 Expression in the Hippocampus of Japanese Quail

“…It is intriguing to note that while simple binding of visual information with head direction likely provides an effective basis for discrimination under many circumstances, it would be vulnerable to interference in the face of similar stimuli. This is consistent with the available behavioral evidence showing that Japanese quail perform poorly when discriminating multiple environments with shared features ( Damphousse et al, 2021 ).…”

“…In fact, the Japanese quail’s ability to perform a number of complex spatial learning tasks is consistent with this idea. Quail show preference for previously blocked arms in a Y-maze ( Damphousse et al, 2021 ), show conditioned place preference ( Mace et al, 1997 ; Eaton et al, 2022 ), and complete foraging arrays comparable to a Barnes maze or Morris water maze ( Ruploh et al, 2011 ; Damphousse et al, 2022 ).…”

Dissociation of spatial and object memory in the hippocampal formation of Japanese quail

“…The SOR protocol used here was adapted from a previous publication testing Japanese quail (Damphousse et al, 2021). Briefly, in a second testing room, birds underwent two SOR tests over two consecutive days within a square arena with walls 90 cm wide and 60 cm tall, constructed from painted plywood (see ).…”

“…The entire body of the subject was to be within the defined 30 cm radius and orientation of the subject toward the object was not required as the field of vision for prey birds, such as quail, is large and an object may be viewed from many positions relative to the head (Martin and Young, 1983; for review see Martin and Osorio, 2008). This criterion successfully demonstrates novelty preference in multiple avian species, including Japanese quail (Damphousse et al, 2021). While 30 cm is a generous distance, quail have much better visual acuity (4.73 G 0.35 c/d; Lee and Djamgoz, 1997) than albino strains of rat (0.5 c/d; Prusky et al, 2002) used within protocols from which the SOR task was originally adapted (for review see Blaser and Heyser, 2015).…”

Functional dissociation along the rostrocaudal axis of Japanese quail hippocampus

“…The YMD protocol used here was adapted from a previous publication testing Japanese quail [ 37 ]. Briefly, Y-maze arms measured 50 x 17 x 45 cm (L x W x H) and were constructed from clear acrylic permitting subjects to readily see distinct visual cues present on all four walls of the room.…”