Wild narrow‐striped mongooses use social information to enhance behavioural flexibility

Abstract

Behavioural flexibility allows animals to adapt their behaviour to changing situations in their current habitat. Flexibility is involved in behaviours comprising decision‐making in their ecological or social environment. However, the ability to behave flexibly can co‐vary with an individual's personality and its level of inhibitory control, so that previous work has not discerned any consistent pattern in the direction of the relationship among these traits. Our aim was, therefore, to examine the influence of neophobia, inhibitory control, and social learning on behavioural flexibility performance in wild narrow‐striped mongooses (Mungotictis decemlineata) in Kirindy Forest, Madagascar. To this end, we conducted novel object tests to assess neophobia, a cylinder task to assess inhibitory control, and a discrimination and reversal learning task to quantify behavioural flexibility in a natural group setting. We found that neophobia did not correlate with learning performance either in the discrimination learning task or in the reversal learning task. Further, individuals exhibiting more inhibitory control learned faster during the initial learning task, but not in the reversed task, suggesting that inhibitory control facilitated individuals' learning abilities but not behavioural flexibility. Finally, opportunities for social learning correlated with individuals' performance during the reversal learning task. Thus, in narrow‐striped mongooses, social learning seems to facilitate behavioural flexibility, in addition to individual learning, in cognitively more challenging situations, such as a reversal learning condition.

Stress axis programming generates long-term effects on cognitive abilities in a cooperative breeder

“…In laboratory rodents, early social experience modulates social learning but not the performance in non-social learning tasks [73–75], suggesting specialized cognitive mechanisms. In narrow-striped mongooses ( Mungotictis decemlineata ) social learning opportunities in groups affected reversal-learning speed negatively [32]. Conversely, in cooperatively breeding Western Australian magpies ( Cracticus tibicen dorsalis ), performance in several non-social cognition tasks was influenced positively by the complexity of the social environment: performance in these tasks improved with increasing group size [9].…”

“…Behavioural flexibility in non-social contexts has been most often evidenced by the ability of animals to override previously formed associations, e.g. by reversal learning [6,7,32]. Here, we exposed N. pulcher adults that had been treated with cortisol and mifepristone during early life [20] to a two-colour discrimination task at the age of 1.5 years to test their learning ability followed by a reversal-learning task to test their behavioural flexibility.…”

Cognitive adaptations in two sympatric mouse lemur species occupying different ecological niches

“…In several prior studies, performance scores were confounded by variation in personality traits (Tebbich et al 2012;Guenther et al 2014). However, these links are by far not consistent across studies, emphasizing the importance to control for such non-cognitive factors (Ducatez et al 2014a;Guillette et al 2015;Logan 2016;Huebner et al 2018;Henke-von der Malsburg and Fichtel 2018;Rasolofoniaina et al 2020;Schubiger et al 2020).…”