Response of male and female domestic chicks to change in the number (quantity) of imprinting objects
- PDF / 1,564,352 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 26 Downloads / 166 Views
Response of male and female domestic chicks to change in the number (quantity) of imprinting objects Bastien S. Lemaire 1
&
Rosa Rugani 2,3 & Lucia Regolin 2 & Giorgio Vallortigara 1
Accepted: 12 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract When facing two sets of imprinting objects of different numerousness, domestic chicks prefer to approach the larger one. Given that choice for familiar and novel stimuli in imprinting situations is known to be affected by the sex of the animals, we investigated how male and female domestic chicks divide the time spent in the proximity of a familiar versus an unfamiliar number of objects, and how animals interact (by pecking) with these objects. We confirmed that chicks discriminate among the different numerousnesses, but we also showed that females and males behave differently, depending on the degree of familiarity of the objects. When objects in the testing sets were all familiar, females equally explored both sets and pecked at all objects individually. Males instead selectively approached the familiar numerousness and pecked more at it. When both testing sets comprised familiar as well as novel objects, both males and females approached the larger numerousness of familiar objects. However, chicks directed all their pecks toward the novel object within the set. Differences in the behavior of males and females can be accounted for in terms of sex difference in the motivation to reinstate social contact with the familiar objects and to explore novel ones, likely associated with the ecology and the social structure of the species before domestication. Keywords Filial imprinting . Domestic chicks . Numerical discrimination . Sex differences
Introduction The investigation of numerical cognition in animals has been challenging. Scientists have been taking advantage of spontaneous choice tasks (where the animals are expected to choose the preferred or the most advantageous option) as well as operant conditioning tasks (Nieder, 2019). Spontaneous preference allows for the investigation of relative numerosity judgments (“more than” or “less than”). Using such procedures, the ability to discriminate between different numerousnesses has been described in several ecological contexts Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-020-00446-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Bastien S. Lemaire [email protected] 1
Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Piazza della Manifaturra 1, 38068 Rovereto, TN, Italy
2
Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
3
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
(Nieder, 2020). While foraging, animals from various taxa show a spontaneous preference for more food items (Bogale, Aoyama, & Sugita, 2014; Gazzola, Vallortigara, & PellitteriRosa, 2018; Hauser, Carey, & Hauser, 2000; Hunt, Low, & Burns, 2008; Lucon-Xiccato et al., 2015; Rodríguez et al., 2015; Rugani et al., 2013
Data Loading...
