The relation between social rank, neophobia and individual learning in starlings

Abstract

Researchers with diverse interests in topics ranging from the formation of dominance hierarchies and social intelligence to animal personalities have predicted specific, and often conflicting, relations between social rank, neophobia and learning ability. We investigated the relations between these variables in captive groups of wild-caught starlings, Sturnus vulgaris, adopting a multidimensional approach to social rank and neophobia. Both agonistic and competitive rank orders were determined for each group and we tested individuals in the absence of their groupmates for object neophobia, latency to feed in a novel environment and performance on an extractive foraging task. In each starling group, the fastest learners occupied the highest competitive ranks, supporting the hypothesis that cognitive ability is positively correlated with social dominance. Competitive rank orders, however, did not correlate significantly with agonistic rank orders. Situation-specific foraging neophobia was suggested: individuals showed consistency in their latencies to feed near a variety of novel objects, but no significant correlation was found between this measure of object neophobia and latency to feed in a novel environment. Starlings fastest to feed in the novel environment were fastest in solving the foraging task. We discuss the implications of these findings for researchers studying hierarchy formation in animal groups, social intelligence and animal personalities.

Coping with novelty and stress in free-living house sparrows

“…In captivity, house sparrows exhibit considerable individual variation in object and food neophobia (Martin and Fitzgerald, 2005), and these two traits are correlated and show individual consistency (V.B., A. Kulcsár and A. Liker, unpublished data), indicating that they constitute an aspect of personality in sparrows, similarly to other bird species, where object neophobia was found to be consistent between individuals (e.g. Boogert et al, 2006;Stöwe et al, 2006b). The corticosterone response is well studied in house sparrows and varies across individuals with sex, season and brood value (Breuner and Orchinik, 2001;Romero et al, 2006;Lendvai et al, 2007;Lendvai and Chastel, 2008).…”

Chapter 5 Insights for Behavioral Ecology from Behavioral Syndromes

“…Individual variation in innovation, or adopting a new behavior pattern when the environment changes, has been documented in several different species (Boogert et al, 2006;Godin et al, 2005;Pfeffer et al, 2002;Reader, 2003), but we know little about whether variation in innovation reflects general learning ability, sociality, boldness, or state dependence [reviewed in Laland and Reader (1999b)]. Some studies have suggested that innovators are likely to be those at the outskirts of social groups (Kummer and Goodall, 1985) and experimental work on guppies has shown that while state-dependent factors such as sex and hunger level are partly responsible for foraging innovations, some individuals are consistently more likely to innovate than others (Laland and Reader, 1999a,b).…”

Individual-learning ability predicts social-foraging strategy in house sparrows

“…In laboratory mice, learning ability was shown to be correlated with exploration behaviour [22] and some association was found between lighter body weight and better learning [23]. Other studies have demonstrated relationships between problem-solving ability and competitive rank and certain measures of neophobia or novelty seeking [18]. Interestingly, the intuitive prediction associating fear and neophobia with poor learning goes back to Hillel the Elder (a first century BC Talmudic scholar) who said: '.…”