The impact of learning opportunities on the development of learning and decision-making: an experiment with passerine birds.

ABSTRACT: Developmental context has been shown to influence learning abilities later in life, namely through experiments with nutritional and/or environmental constraints (i.e. lack of enrichment). However, little is known about the extent to which opportunities for learning affect the development of animal cognition, even though such opportunities are known to influence human cognitive development. We exposed young zebra finches (Taenopygia guttata) (n = 26) to one of three experimental conditions, i.e. an environment where (i) colour cues reliably predicted the presence of food (associative learning), (ii) a combination of two-colour cues reliably predicted the presence of food (conditional learning), or (iii) colour cues were non-informative (control). After conducting two different

SUBMITTER: Rojas-Ferrer I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7293162 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature