Learning & Behavior最新文献

Liao et al. demonstrated that crows can count out loud, revealing a level of vocal control previously unobserved in nonhuman species. This discovery suggests that rather than being judged by primate standards, birds might represent a new benchmark for vocal and perhaps broader cognitive abilities.

Many ant species can respond to dramatic changes in local conditions by relocating the entire colony to a new location. While we know that careful learning walks enable the homing behavior of foraging ants to their original nest, we do not know whether additional learning is required to navigate to the new nest location. To answer this question, we investigated the nest relocation behavior of a colony of Australian desert ants (Melophorus bagoti) that relocated their nest in response to heavy rainfall in the semidesert terrain of Alice Springs. We identified five types of behavior: exploration between nests (Old-to-New nest and New-to-Old nest), transport from Old to New nest, and relearning walks at Old and New nests. Initially, the workers performed relearning walks at the Old nest and exploratory walks between the Old and New nests. Once they completed the exploratory walks, the workers transported resources and brood to the new nest. Finally, we observed the workers performing relearning walks at the New nest. While the relearning walks at the Old nest were slow and appear to enable exploratory walks to the New nest, the relearning walks at the new nest were faster and appeared to enable homing from foraging trips. These observations shed insight on how learning helps these ants to respond to sudden changes in their environment.

Despite popular culture's promotion of the elephant's ability to "never forget," there is remarkably limited empirical research on the memory capacities of any living elephant species (Asian, Elephas maximus; African savanna, Loxodonta africana; African forest, Loxodonta cyclotis). A growing body of literature on elephant cognition and behavioral ecology has provided insight into the elephant's ability to behave flexibly in changing physical and social environments, but little direct evidence of how memory might relate to this flexibility exists. In this paper, we review and discuss the potential relationships between what we know about elephant cognition and behavior and the elephants' memory for the world around them as they navigate their physical, social, and spatial environments. We also discuss future directions for investigating elephant memory and implications for such research on elephant conservation and human-elephant conflict mitigation.

Humans and other animals often seek instrumental information to strategically improve their decisions in the present. Our curiosity also leads us to acquire non-instrumental information that is not immediately useful but can be encoded in memory and stored for use in the future by means of episodic recall. Despite its adaptive benefits and central role in human cognition, questions remain about the cognitive mechanisms and evolutionary origins that underpin curiosity. Here, we comparatively review recent empirical studies that some authors have suggested reflects curiosity in nonhuman animals. We focus on findings from laboratory tasks in which individuals can choose to gain advanced information about uncertain future outcomes, even though the information cannot be used to increase future rewards and is often costly. We explore the prevalence of preferences in these tasks across animals, discuss the theoretical advances that they have promoted, and outline some limitations in contemporary research. We also discuss several features of human curiosity that can guide future empirical research aimed at characterising and understanding curiosity in animals. Though the prevalence of curiosity in animals is actively debated, we surmise that investigating behavioural candidates for curiosity-motivated behaviour in a broader range of species and contexts, should help promote theoretical advances in our understanding of cognitive principles and evolutionary pressures that support curiosity-driven behaviour.

Recent findings indicate that noise pollution - presented in the absence of other variables - has both immediate-term impacts on young birds' developmental rates and physiology as well as long-term effects on adult telomere length and reproductive success. This work highlights yet another set of negative impacts caused by anthropogenic noise, and suggests that the dramatic fitness consequences observed likely have implications for the evolution of learning and behavior in animals living in noisy environments.

With the general aim of providing more evidence for considering certain behaviors involved in the act of remembering as operant, two experiments were carried out to verify its sensitivity to differential reinforcement, and to some of the variables upon which it depends. In the first experiment, three children participated, and two variables were manipulated in a "free recall" task: the accuracy of the instructions and the magnitude of the reinforcer applied to the emission of the target words. In the second experiment, 60 was changed to one of comparison between groups. In this case, the response-reinforcer interval (immediate vs. delayed) was manipulated using a "recognition" task. In both experiments, a greater number of remembered items were found in the presence of reinforcement compared to its absence, as well as with a greater magnitude of the reinforcer and with a shorter delay. These results are discussed considering the peculiarities of verbal behavior in humans and provide evidence that operant processes have an important role in traditional human memory tasks.

Although the diversification of species has fascinated researchers for centuries, we know remarkably little about how behavior influences niche adaptation and the genetic mechanisms through which behavior evolves. In their recent study, Sommer-Trembo et al. (Science, 384, 470-475, 2024) demonstrate a critical role for the regulatory gene cacng5b in modulating phenotypic variation in exploratory behavior in one of the most exceptional adaptive radiations: the African cichlid fishes of Lake Tanganyika.

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) have been documented to 'overimitate' humans - a form of social learning - by copying their causally-irrelevant actions. It is suggested that this behaviour results from social, affiliative motivations. Dogs have also been known to behave differently when they are being watched (or not) by humans, such as by following commands better (or worse). In this study, we tested whether dogs' copying behaviour would also be sensitive to their caregiver's attentional states. The subject's caregiver demonstrated irrelevant and relevant actions in the dot-touching overimitation task, then during trials the caregiver was either watching their dog or turned away. Our results revealed no difference in dogs' irrelevant-action copying; however, we found that dogs approached the dots less per trial when their caregiver was watching them. Dogs also copied their caregiver's leftward sliding of a door (to obtain a food reward) more accurately when they were being watched by their caregiver. Finally, dogs who copied the irrelevant action did so more often after obtaining their food reward, which supports that these dogs may have had two separate goals: a primary instrumental goal and a secondary social goal.

The order of stimuli within sequences and the transitional probabilities (TPs) it generates are central information in sequence processing. However, less is known about what type of information and how it is extracted by general learning mechanisms. The present study focused on statistical learning of second-order TPs. Second-order TPs are involved when only the combination of two stimuli predicts the third. In a first experiment, TPs depended crucially on the order of presentation of a pair $A-B$ , which led to different predictions depending on the order of the stimuli (i.e., ABC vs. BAF). Eight visuomotor sequences governed by second-order TPs were used and response times (RTs) were recorded for each transition. The task included a learning phase followed by a switch phase during which the second-order TP were reversed (e.g., the sequences ABC and BAF became respectively ABF and BAC). A decrease of RTs between the second and the third stimulus during the learning phase and an increase of RTs during the switch phase suggested that variations of orders within second-order TPs could be learned. Further analyses, however, indicated that such learning was difficult for most participants. A second experiment showed that the difficulty of learning was not solely due to the difficulty to pick up the effect of order of presentation, but that learning second-order transitional probabilities in addition to order would be the main obstacle. These experiments suggest that statistical learning is capable of learning complex associations, even if this remains a challenge for human cognition.