Predictably harsh environment is associated with reduced cognitive flexibility in wild food-caching mountain chickadees
Predictably harsh environment is associated with reduced cognitive flexibility in wild food-caching mountain chickadees
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DOI：
10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.10.004
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发表时间：
2017-01-01
期刊：
影响因子：
2.5
通讯作者：
Pravosudov, Vladimir V.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Croston, Rebecca;Branch, Carrie L.;Pravosudov, Vladimir V.
认知是行为灵活性的基础机制之一，但认知本身的灵活性可能会因学习新信息的能力和保留旧记忆的能力之间的权衡而有所不同。认知灵活性如何以及何时受到这种权衡的限制仍然知之甚少。我们调查了认知灵活性的野生食物缓存山雀，Poecile gambeli，在不同海拔经历不同程度的环境严酷的非繁殖季节，使用空间学习和记忆逆转范式。海拔之间的采样策略没有显着差异，但高海拔山雀比低海拔山雀在逆转任务中表现更差，表明认知灵活性较低。与初始学习任务相比，低海拔山雀在逆转任务中的表现有所改善，而高海拔山雀表现较差。高海拔的鸟类比其他地方更频繁地检查以前的奖励位置，这表明认知灵活性降低与主动干扰有关。考虑到高海拔山雀缓存更多的食物，可能更依赖于这些缓存比他们的同类从低海拔，山雀从两个海拔使用类似的采样策略，我们的研究结果表明，更强的记忆更多的缓存可能会干扰收购和保留新的记忆。总的来说，我们的研究结果表明，可预见的恶劣环境可能有利于更强的记忆，而代价是认知灵活性降低，这可能是由增加的主动干扰驱动的。(C)2016动物行为研究协会。由爱思唯尔有限公司出版。保留所有权利。
Cognition is one of the mechanisms underlying behavioural flexibility, but flexibility of cognition itself may vary as a result of trade-offs between the ability to learn new information and the ability to retain old memories. How and when cognitive flexibility is constrained by this trade-off remains poorly understood. We investigated cognitive flexibility in wild food-caching mountain chickadees, Poecile gambeli, at different elevations experiencing different levels of environmental harshness during the nonbreeding season, using a spatial learning and memory reversal paradigm. There were no significant differences in sampling strategies between elevations, but high-elevation chickadees performed worse than low-elevation chickadees on the reversal task, indicating lower cognitive flexibility. Compared to the initial learning task, low-elevation chickadees improved their performance during the reversal task, while high-elevation chickadees performed worse. High-elevation birds inspected previously rewarding locations more frequently than other locations, suggesting that reduced cognitive flexibility is associated with proactive interference. Considering that high-elevation chickadees cache more food and are likely more dependent on these caches than their conspecifics from low elevation, and that chickadees from both elevations use similar sampling strategies, our findings suggest that stronger memories of more caches might interfere with acquisition and retention of new memories. Overall, our results suggest that predictably harsh environments might favour stronger memories at the expense of decreased cognitive flexibility, which is likely driven by increased proactive interference. (C) 2016 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.