The impact of learning opportunities on the development of learning and decision-making: an experiment with passerine birds

Abstract

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’.

Extended parenting and the evolution of cognition

“…We also need to understand much better how learning varies through individual life stages, between species, comparatively across multiple species, and evolutionarily through time [13,91]. Most fundamentally, we are in need of more developmental studies that examine how the social environment impacts on brain development, and consequently on the skills expressed by juveniles [92].…”

Casting the Net Widely for Change in Animal Welfare: The Plight of Birds in Zoos, Ex Situ Conservation, and Conservation Fieldwork

“…Scientific literature on animal welfare has translated ‘beneficial’ into measurable categories of behavior and physiological responses and these have been taken as a guide to what constitutes enrichment. Welfare initiatives, also for birds, today generally fall into several categories usually referred as “food-based” [ 31 ] “structural” [ 18 ], “sensory” [ 112 , 113 , 114 , 115 ] “environmental” [ 35 , 116 , 117 ], “social” [ 25 , 30 ], and “cognitive” enrichment [ 32 , 118 , 119 ]. Each category can be tested separately but, ultimately, all of these categories are relevant to each and every bird.…”

Introduction to special issue: ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals’

“…Rojas-Ferrer & Morand-Ferron [19] report empirical studies that examine how experiences early in life shape later cognitive abilities in another cognitively sophisticated class of animals, birds. Specifically, these authors investigate how early opportunities for learning affect choice accuracy and decision-making speed in captive juvenile zebra finches (Taenopygia guttata).…”

“…All these separate areas of research progress weave together in the papers in this issue. The papers are organized methodologically, beginning with broad theoretical discussions [15][16][17], moving to studies of birds [18,19] and primates [20,21], looking at human evolutionary history as reflected in anthropology and archaeology [22][23][24][25][26] and finally, focusing on studies of humans in modern societies [27][28][29]. But much of the interest of this special issue comes in the cross-cutting themes across these different methodologies and populations.…”