Does social environment influence learning ability in a family-living lizard?
Abstract
Early developmental environment can have profound effects on individual physiology, behaviour, and learning. In birds and mammals social isolation during development is known to negatively affect learning ability; yet in other taxa, like reptiles, the effect of social isolation during development on learning ability is unknown. We investigated how social environment affects learning ability in the family-living tree skink (Egernia striolata). We hypothesized that early social environment shapes cognitive development in skinks, and predicted that skinks raised in social isolation would have reduced learning ability compared to skinks raised socially. Offspring were separated at birth into two treatments: (1) raised alone, or (2) in a pair. After one year we quantified spatial learning ability of skinks in these treatments (N = 14 solitary, 14 social). We found no effect of treatment on learning ability. The number of skinks to successfully learn the task, the number of trials taken to learn the task, the latency to perform the task, and the number of errors in each trial did not differ between isolated and socially-reared skinks. Our results were unexpected, yet the facultative nature of this species’ social system may result in a reduced effect of social isolation on behaviour when compared to species with obligate sociality. Overall, our findings do not provide evidence that social environment affects development of spatial learning ability in this family-living lizard.
Citation
Riley , J L , Noble , D W A , Byrne , R W & Whiting , M J 2017 , ' Does social environment influence learning ability in a family-living lizard? ' , Animal Cognition , vol. 20 , no. 3 , pp. 449-458 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-016-1068-0
Publication
Animal Cognition
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1435-9448Type
Journal article
Rights
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-016-1068-0
Description
Financial support for this research was provided by the Australian Research Council (DP130102998, awarded to MJW and RWB), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (scholarship to JLR), the Australasian Society for the Study of Animal Behaviour, the Australian Museum, and Macquarie University. DWAN was supported by an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE150101774) and UNSW Vice Chancellors Fellowship.Collections
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