Spatial Learning and Memory, Cognitive Flexibility, and Rule-Learning in Food-Caching Mountain Chickadees (Poecile gambeli) Across an Elevational Gradient

How and why individuals differ in their cognitive abilities within and across species remain important and unresolved questions in behavioral and evolutionary ecology. Cognitive traits are involved in many critical behaviors, enabling individuals to use past experiences to inform future decisions or to reduce unpredictability in the environment. But most cognitive experiments have been conducted in laboratory conditions without a strong ecological or evolutionary context, and so do not address to what extent environmental factors influence cognitive traits and associated behaviors. Moreover, although many behaviors likely involve multiple cognitive traits, it is still unclear to what extent there may be tradeoffs between cognitive traits or between higher-order executive control functions. Executive control functions are associated with goal-oriented behaviors and may be highly advantageous, as they are involved with rule learning and using abstract, relational concepts; however, they remain highly controversial in nonhuman animals and have rarely been studied outside of a laboratory context. In this dissertation, I designed and conducted several spatial cognitive tasks to investigate individual variation in spatial learning and memory, cognitive flexibility, and rule-learning in wild, food-caching mountain chickadees ( Poecile gambeli ). I found that chickadees updated information about their environments more frequently in harsher, less predictable winter environments than in milder, more predictable ones. I showed that chickadees were capable of learning and using multiple different rules within a foraging context, and I demonstrated some of the first evidence for abstract-rule learning in nonhuman animals in the wild. Moreover, proactive interference associated with learned associations from two cognitive tasks appeared to influence subsequent foraging decisions and varied with individual cognitive ability on two spatial tasks. Altogether, these results provide new insight into the cognitive ecology of mountain chickadees and the cognitive traits that may play a role in shaping information-related behaviors.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctorate Degree

Grantor

University of Nevada, Reno

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Nguyen, Lauren Benedict

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Pravosudov, Vladimir

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Allen, Julie
• Ouyang, Jenny
• Parchman, Tom
• Matocq, Marjorie

• Animal Behavior
• Avian Cognition
• Cognitive Ecology
• Food-caching
• Learning And Memory
• Spatial Cognition

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://scholarwolf.unr.edu/handle/11714/11006

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarwolf.unr.edu:11714/11006