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Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
University of Nebraska - Lincoln
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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Social Complexity And Transitive Inference In Corvids, Alan B. Bond, Alan Kamil, Russell P. Balda
Social Complexity And Transitive Inference In Corvids, Alan B. Bond, Alan Kamil, Russell P. Balda
Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences
The social complexity hypothesis asserts that animals living in large social groups should display enhanced cognitive abilities along predictable dimensions. To test this concept, we compared highly social pinyon jays, Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus, with relatively nonsocial western scrub-jays, Aphelocoma californica, on two complex cognitive tasks relevant to the ability to track and assess social relationships. Pinyon jays learned to track multiple dyadic relationships more rapidly and more accurately than scrub-jays and appeared to display a more robust and accurate mechanism of transitive inference. These results provide a clear demonstration of the association between social complexity and cognition in animals.
Searching By Rules: Pigeons’ (Columba Livia) Landmark-Based Search According To Constant Bearing Or Constant Distance, Marcia C. Spetch, Tiana B. Rust, Alan Kamil, Juli E. Jones
Searching By Rules: Pigeons’ (Columba Livia) Landmark-Based Search According To Constant Bearing Or Constant Distance, Marcia C. Spetch, Tiana B. Rust, Alan Kamil, Juli E. Jones
Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences
Pigeons (Columba livia) searched for a goal location defined by a constant relative spatial relationship to 2 landmarks. For one group, landmark-to-goal bearings remained constant while distance varied. For another group, landmark-to-goal distances remained constant while direction varied. Birds were trained with 4 interlandmark distances and then tested with 5 novel interlandmark distances. Overall error magnitude was similar across groups and was larger than previously reported for Clark’s nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana). During training, error magnitude increased with interlandmark distance for constant-bearing but not constant-distance birds. Both groups searched less accurately along the axis parallel to landmarks …
A Comparative Analysis Of Social Play In Birds, Judy Diamond, Alan B. Bond
A Comparative Analysis Of Social Play In Birds, Judy Diamond, Alan B. Bond
Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences
Although social play is broadly distributed among mammals, it is infrequently encountered in other vertebrate taxa. It is, however, displayed in a fully realized and complex form in several groups of birds. Unambiguous accounts of social play have been recorded from thirteen species of parrots, seven species of corvids, and several hornbills and Eurasian babblers. We conducted an analysis of the avian play literature, testing for differences between avian taxa, as well as for correlations between play complexity, brain size, and age of first reproduction. Corvids were far more likely to show social object play than parrots. Corvids, parrots, and …