Loading...
High temperatures are associated with reduced cognitive performance in wild southern pied babblers
Soravia, Camilla Ashton, Benjamin J. Thornton, Alex Ridley, Amanda R.
Soravia, Camilla
Ashton, Benjamin J.
Thornton, Alex
Ridley, Amanda R.
Citations
Altmetric:
Advisors
Editors
Other Contributors
EPub Date
Publication Date
2023-11-22
Submitted Date
Collections
Files
Loading...
Article - AAM
Adobe PDF, 415.9 KB
Other Titles
Abstract
Global temperatures are increasing rapidly. While considerable research is accumulating regarding the lethal and sublethal effects of heat on wildlife, its potential impact on animal cognition has received limited attention. Here, we tested wild southern pied babblers (<i>Turdoides bicolor</i>) on three cognitive tasks (associative learning, reversal learning and inhibitory control) under naturally occurring heat stress and non-heat stress conditions. We determined whether cognitive performance was explained by temperature, heat dissipation behaviours, individual and social attributes, or proxies of motivation. We found that temperature, but not heat dissipation behaviours, predicted variation in associative learning performance. Individuals required on average twice as many trials to learn an association when the maximum temperature during testing exceeded 38°C compared with moderate temperatures. Higher temperatures during testing were also associated with reduced inhibitory control performance, but only in females. By contrast, we found no temperature-related decline in performance in the reversal learning task, albeit individuals reached learning criterion in only 14 reversal learning tests. Our findings provide novel evidence of temperature-mediated cognitive impairment in a wild animal and indicate that its occurrence depends on the cognitive trait examined and individual sex.
Citation
Soravia, C., Ashton, B. J., Thornton, A., & Ridley, A. R. (2023). High temperatures are associated with reduced cognitive performance in wild southern pied babblers. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 290(2011), article-number 20231077. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.1077
Publisher
The Royal Society
Journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Research Unit
PubMed ID
PubMed Central ID
Type
Article
Language
en
Description
© 2023 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society.
Series/Report no.
ISSN
0962-8452
EISSN
1471-2954
ISBN
ISMN
Gov't Doc
Test Link
Sponsors
This work was funded by the Australian Government Research Training Program through a scholarship awarded to C.S. at The University of Western Australia (UWA) and by the Australian Research Council through a Discovery Project grant (no. DP220103823) awarded to A.R.R., B.J.A. and A.T. This work was also supported by the Rotary Club of Melville and the Postgraduate Student Association of UWA through two awards to C.S. The KRR, the study site where this research was based, was financed by the Universities of Cambridge and Zurich, the MAVA Foundation and the European Research Council (grant no. 294494) and received logistical support from the Mammal Research Institute of the University of Pretoria.