Guido Jorgelina María, Biondi Laura Marina, Vasallo Aldo Ivan, Muzio Rubén Nestor
Laboratorio Ecotono INIBIOMA (CONICET- Universidad Nacional del Comahue), Bariloche, Río Negro, Argentina.
Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras (IIMyC), CONICET - Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Funes 3250, B7602AYJ, Mar del Plata, Argentina.
Anim Cogn. 2017 Jul;20(4):591-602. doi: 10.1007/s10071-017-1083-9. Epub 2017 Mar 25.
In an ever-changing environment, the ability to adapt choices to new conditions is essential for daily living and ultimately, for survival. Behavioural flexibility allows animals to maximise survival and reproduction in novel settings by adjusting their behaviour based on specific information and feedback acquired in their current environments. However, a growing body of evidence indicates that an individual's personality type can limit the extent to which the individual might behave flexibly, by influencing the way an individual pays attention to novelty and how much information it collects and stores, which in turn affects the individual's decision-making and learning process. In this study, the behavioural flexibility of a generalist predator, the Chimango Caracara, Milvago chimango, was analysed using the reversal learning paradigm, focusing on the comparison between age classes, and the relation of learning flexibility with a personality trait, the level of neophobia. Due to the low number of male individuals captured, this study was carried out only with female birds. The results showed that age had no significant effect either on the acquisition of a stimulus-reward association, or on the capacity of reversing this previously learned association. Reversal of the response was a harder task for these birds in comparison with the initial acquisition process. The individual's performances in the learning tasks seemed to be uncorrelated with each other, suggesting that they involve different neural mechanisms. Contrary to the general pattern observed in the majority of previous work on personality and cognition in non-human animals, the level of neophobia did not correlate with the initial associative learning performance in both adults and juveniles, yet it showed a significant negative relationship with reversal learning ability, mainly in the regressive phase of this task, for the two age classes. Our results suggest that the predatory and generalist lifestyle of female individuals of M. chimango along with the selective pressures of the environment of the individuals studied might play a critical role in the degree and direction of the linkage between novelty response and learning flexibility observed in this study.
在不断变化的环境中，使选择适应新情况的能力对于日常生活乃至最终的生存至关重要。行为灵活性使动物能够通过根据在当前环境中获得的特定信息和反馈来调整行为，从而在新环境中最大限度地提高生存和繁殖能力。然而，越来越多的证据表明，个体的性格类型会通过影响个体关注新奇事物的方式以及收集和存储信息的数量，来限制个体行为灵活的程度，进而影响个体的决策和学习过程。在本研究中，使用反转学习范式分析了一种泛化性捕食者—— Chimango 卡拉鹰（Milvago chimango）的行为灵活性，重点关注不同年龄组之间的比较，以及学习灵活性与一种性格特征——新物恐惧水平之间的关系。由于捕获的雄性个体数量较少，本研究仅对雌性鸟类进行。结果表明，年龄对刺激 - 奖励关联的习得以及对先前习得关联的反转能力均无显著影响。与最初的习得过程相比，这些鸟类反转反应是一项更难的任务。个体在学习任务中的表现似乎相互不相关，这表明它们涉及不同的神经机制。与之前大多数关于非人类动物性格与认知的研究中观察到的一般模式相反，新物恐惧水平在成年和幼年个体中均与最初的联想学习表现无关，但在该任务的回归阶段，它与反转学习能力呈现出显著的负相关，这在两个年龄组中均如此。我们的结果表明，Chimango 卡拉鹰雌性个体的捕食性和泛化性生活方式以及所研究个体所处环境的选择压力，可能在本研究中观察到的新奇反应与学习灵活性之间的联系程度和方向上发挥关键作用。
