Sulikowski Danielle, Burke Darren
Centre for the Integrative Study of Animal Behaviour, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales 2109, Australia.
Biol Lett. 2007 Jun 22;3(3):245-8. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2007.0122.
The tendency of nectarivorous birds to perform better on tasks requiring them to avoid previously rewarding locations (to win-shift) than to return to them (win-stay) has been explained as an adaptation to the depleting nature of nectar. This interpretation relies on the previously untested assumption that the win-shift tendency is not associated with food types possessing a different distribution. To test this assumption, we examined the specificity of this bias to different food types in an omnivorous honeyeater, the noisy miner (Manorina melanocephala). As predicted, we found that the win-shift bias was sensitive to foraging context, manifesting only in association with foraging for nectar, not with foraging for invertebrates.
食蜜鸟类在需要它们避开先前有奖励的地点（赢-转换）而不是返回这些地点（赢-停留）的任务中表现更好，这种倾向被解释为对花蜜消耗特性的一种适应。这种解释依赖于一个先前未经检验的假设，即赢-转换倾向与具有不同分布的食物类型无关。为了检验这个假设，我们在杂食性吸蜜鸟——吵闹矿工鸟（黑头矿鸟）中研究了这种偏向对不同食物类型的特异性。正如预测的那样，我们发现赢-转换偏向对觅食环境敏感，仅在与采食花蜜相关时表现出来，而与采食无脊椎动物无关。
