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General cognitive performance declines with female age and is negatively related to fledging success in a wild bird
Soravia, Camilla Ashton, Benjamin J. Thornton, Alex Ridley, Amanda R.
Soravia, Camilla
Ashton, Benjamin J.
Thornton, Alex
Ridley, Amanda R.
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2022-12-21
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Abstract
Identifying the causes and fitness consequences of intraspecific variation in cognitive performance is fundamental to understand how cognition evolves. Selection may act on different cognitive traits separately or jointly as part of the general cognitive performance (GCP) of the individual. To date, few studies have examined simultaneously whether individual cognitive performance covaries across different cognitive tasks, the relative importance of individual and social attributes in determining cognitive variation, and its fitness consequences in the wild. Here, we tested 38 wild southern pied babblers (<i>Turdoides bicolor</i>) on a cognitive test battery targeting associative learning, reversal learning and inhibitory control. We found that a single factor explained 59.5% of the variation in individual cognitive performance across tasks, suggestive of a general cognitive factor. GCP varied by age and sex; declining with age in females but not males. Older females also tended to produce a higher average number of fledglings per year compared to younger females. Analysing over 10 years of breeding data, we found that individuals with lower general cognitive performance produced more fledglings per year. Collectively, our findings support the existence of a trade-off between cognitive performance and reproductive success in a wild bird.
Citation
Soravia, C., Ashton, B. J., Thornton, A., & Ridley, A. R. (2022). General cognitive performance declines with female age and is negatively related to fledging success in a wild bird. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 289(1989), article-number 20221748. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.1748
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The Royal Society
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Proceedings of the Royal Society B
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Article
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en
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© 2022 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society.
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0962-8452
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1471-2954
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This work was funded by the Australian Government Research Training Program through a scholarship awarded to C.S. at the University of Western Australia. The Kuruman River Reserve (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 to Tim Clutton-Brock) and received logistical support from the Mammal Research Institute of the University of Pretoria.