Learning & Behavior最新文献

A recent paper Smulders et al., (2023) analyzed results of an experiment in which food-caching coal tits needed to relocate and recover multiple previously made food caches and argued that food caching parids use familiarity and not recollection memory when recovering food caches. The memory task involving recovery of multiple caches in the same trial, however, cannot discriminate between these two memory mechanisms because small birds do not need to recover multiple caches to eat during a single trial. They satiate quickly after eating just the first recovered food cache and quickly lose motivation to search for caches, and can be expected to start exploring noncache locations rather than recovering the remaining caches, which would result in inaccurate memory measurements.

To survive and reproduce, animals need to behave adaptively by adjusting their behavior to their environment, with learning facilitating some of these processes. Dogs have become a go-to model species in comparative cognition studies, making our understanding of their learning skills paramount at multiple levels, not only with regards to basic research on their cognitive skills and the effects of domestication, but also with applied purposes such as training. In order to tackle these issues, we tested similarly raised wolves and dogs in a serial learning task inspired by Harlow's "learning set." In Phase 1, different pairs of objects were presented to the animals, one of which was baited while the other was not. Both species' performance gradually improved with each new set of objects, showing that they "learnt to learn," but no differences were found between the species in their learning speed. In Phase 2, once subjects had learned the association between one of the objects and the food reward, the contingencies were reversed and the previously unrewarded object of the same pair was now rewarded. Dogs' performance in this task seemed to be better than wolves', albeit only when considering just the first session of each reversal, suggesting that the dogs might be more flexible than wolves. Further research (possibly with the aid of refined methods such as computer-based tasks) would help ascertain whether these differences between wolves and dogs are persistent across different learning tasks.

Research has examined how stimulants affect impulsive choice in delay-discounting tasks, but little is known about whether such drugs influence how discounting varies with reward magnitude. This study sought to investigate the effects of acute and chronic methamphetamine administration on rats' responding in a rapid acquisition choice task in which reward delays were changed unpredictably across sessions. In each group of four sessions, delays were unequal (1 s/8 s, or 8 s/1 s) or equal (1 s/1 s, or 8 s/8 s) while reward magnitudes were constant and unequal (one dipper cycle/four dipper cycles). This enabled us to obtain both estimates of delay discounting (i.e., sensitivity to delay) and the magnitude effect (in which larger rewards are discounted at a lower rate). Methamphetamine was administered in increasing doses acutely and chronically. Baseline results showed that rats reliably preferred the alternative with a shorter delay and that choice for the larger reward was greater when the delays were long, consistent with the magnitude effect. Acute methamphetamine dose dependently reduced both sensitivity to delay and the magnitude effect, but not sensitivity to magnitude. Chronic administration had no systematic effect on choice. This study is the first to report a magnitude effect with rats in a rapid acquisition choice procedure similar to that found in delay discounting research with humans, and suggests that acute methamphetamine administration reduces control by contingencies that change across sessions.

In a recent study, Johnson and Wynne found that dogs classically conditioned to associate electric shocks with chasing a fast-moving mechanical lure inhibited chasing behaviour at test, while dogs conditioned with food rewards did not learn any operant behaviours to substitute chasing and therefore continued to interact with the lure. Here, we raise questions about the suitability of the training protocols and challenge the conclusion that shock collars impose minimal welfare impacts.

Previous investigations into referential use of object words by dogs have revealed limited understanding in this domain by most dogs. However, a recent study by Boros et al. (Current Biology, 34(8), 1750-1754, 2024) has provided neurological evidence suggesting that understanding of the referential nature of object words and the ability to form mental representations of objects may actually be prevalent among dogs.

A new study investigates how stingless bee colonies inherit one of two architecturally distinct types of comb and proposes the primary mechanism of inheritance as stigmergy: among-individual coordination in comb building informed by environmental cues (i.e., social artefacts). These findings highlight the importance of social information in creating and maintaining architectural variance among structures.

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.

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.

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.

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.