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Social learning about construction behaviour via an artefact

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Breen2019_Article_SocialLearningAboutConstructio.pdf (1.907Mb)
Date
05/2019
Author
Breen, Alexis J.
Bonneaud, Clémence C.
Healy, Susan D.
Guillette, Lauren Mary
Keywords
Animal building
Animal construction
Construction artefacts
Nest construction
Material preference
Social learning
Zebra finch
QH301 Biology
DAS
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Abstract
One source of public information may be the enduring products of others’ behaviour, such as discarded tools or vacated nests. Here, we examined whether observation of a nest affects the material captive zebra finch males prefer when they construct their first nest. It does: for first-time nest construction, males that viewed only an empty cage preferred the colour of material each initially favoured but those males that had observed a pre-built nest of material of their non-preferred colour lost their material-colour preference altogether. Additionally, half of the males that viewed a nest were tested in an environment (the laboratory) different to that in which they were reared (an outdoor aviary). We had expected the aviary-reared (versus laboratory-reared) males would be more uncertain, and thus more likely to select material for their first nest that matched in colour to the colour of the ‘demonstrated’ nest—but this was not the case. The aviary-reared males did, however, tend to touch first the demonstrated colour of material more than did the laboratory-reared males. Together these results show that both observation of a nest and a change in environment can influence the material choices of novice builders. For naïve animal builders, then, construction artefacts can be information resources for learning about potential construction material.
Citation
Breen , A J , Bonneaud , C C , Healy , S D & Guillette , L M 2019 , ' Social learning about construction behaviour via an artefact ' , Animal Cognition , vol. 22 , no. 3 , pp. 305–315 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-019-01240-x
Publication
Animal Cognition
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-019-01240-x
ISSN
1435-9448
Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
Funding: UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BB/M013944/1).
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/17071

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