School of Biological Sciences, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.
Anim Cogn. 2024 Oct 25;27(1):70. doi: 10.1007/s10071-024-01911-4.
Self-control allows animals to resist instant gratification and invest more time and/or energy in better outcomes. However, widespread temporal self-control tasks lack ecological validity for many species, and few studies have explored whether self-control can be measured in the wild. We used a spatial discounting task resembling natural foraging decisions to measure self-control in wild toutouwai (Petroica longipes), a songbird endemic to New Zealand. Birds chose between a near, low-quality food item and a high-quality food item further away. Toutouwai showed striking individual variation in their self-control abilities. Validation tests suggested that our task reliably measured self-control in a spatial foraging context. However, individual-level performance was confounded by food preferences and the satiation and/or learning effects associated with increasing trial number, limiting the applicability of this task as a measure of individual variation in self-control. Nonetheless, we found no correlation between an individual's self-control and their inhibitory control measured using a detour task, suggesting that self-control is a distinct ability from the suppression of impulsive motor actions in toutouwai. This study demonstrates for the first time that a bird is capable of self-control in a spatial context and provides suggestions for how future researchers may robustly quantify individual differences in self-control in the wild.
自我控制使动物能够抵制即时满足，从而投入更多的时间和/或精力来获得更好的结果。然而，对于许多物种来说，广泛使用的时间自我控制任务缺乏生态有效性，并且很少有研究探索自我控制是否可以在野外进行测量。我们使用类似于自然觅食决策的空间折扣任务来衡量野生啄花鸟（Petroica longipes）的自我控制能力，啄花鸟是新西兰特有的一种鸣禽。鸟类可以在近的、低质量的食物和远的、高质量的食物之间进行选择。啄花鸟在自我控制能力方面表现出惊人的个体差异。验证测试表明，我们的任务在空间觅食背景下可靠地测量了自我控制能力。然而，个体水平的表现受到食物偏好以及与试验次数增加相关的饱足和/或学习效应的影响，限制了该任务作为衡量自我控制个体差异的适用性。尽管如此，我们发现啄花鸟的自我控制与使用迂回任务测量的抑制控制之间没有相关性，这表明自我控制是一种与冲动运动行为抑制不同的能力。这项研究首次证明了鸟类在空间环境中具有自我控制能力，并为未来的研究人员如何在野外可靠地量化自我控制的个体差异提供了建议。
