Learning and motor-impulse control in domestic fowl and crows

Abstract

Cognitive abilities allow animals to navigate through complex, fluctuating environments. For example, behavioural flexibility, which is the ability of an animal to alter their behaviour in response to a novel stimulus or to modify responses to as familiar stimulus or behavioural inhibition, defined as the ability to control a response in order to choose a conflicting course of action. Behavioural flexibility and inhibitory control are expected to vary between and within species based on socio-ecological factors. In the present study we compared performance of a captive group of eight crows, Corvus corone, and ten domestic fowl, Gallus gallus domesticus, in two cognitive tasks, the cylinder task as a test of motor inhibitory control, and reversal learning as a measure of learning ability and behavioural flexibility. Four crows and nine fowl completed the cylinder task, eight crows completed the reversal learning experiment and nine fowl were tested in the acquisition phase, however three fowl did not complete the reversal phase of the experiment due to time constraints. Crows performed significantly better in the cylinder task compared to domestic fowl. In the reversal learning experiment, species did not significantly differ in the number of trials until learning criterion was reached. In crows, individuals who needed less trials to reach learning criterion in the acquisition phase also needed less trials to reach the criterion in the reversal phase. This relationship was lacking in domestic fowl. Performance in the learning task did not correlate with performance in the cylinder task in domestic fowl. Our results show crows to possess significantly better motor-inhibitory control compared to domestic fowl, which could be indicative of this specific aspect of executive functioning to be lacking in domestic fowl. In contrast learning performance in a reversal learning task did not differ between crows and domestic fowl, indicating similar levels of behavioural flexibility in both species.