Abstract
Animals frequently encounter situations in which they can choose to move either left or right. Consistent preferences to move a specific direction may be associated with lateralization, or the asymmetric structure and function of the brain and nervous system. Other lateralized behaviors commonly occur across taxa, possibly reflecting a selective advantage of cerebral specialization. Yet, lateralization and possible directional biases are rarely tested within an ecologically relevant context, such as movement, or while animals are making decisions on a larger scale. Here, we quantify to what extent wild food-caching mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli) in their natural environment demonstrate consistent directional biases in movement when learning a spatial task. Directional bias was estimated from the direction (left or right) that birds moved around a square experimental apparatus while searching for a food reward at the beginning of the tasks, at which point birds had not yet fully learned the location of the food reward. Chickadees did not show a directional bias in movement at a population level. Individual variation in directional bias was significantly repeatable across years but did not significantly vary between two elevations and was not significantly associated with performance on either a spatial learning and memory task or a single spatial reversal learning task. Overall, our results show that chickadees did not show directional bias when deciding what direction to move during spatial cognitive tasks, suggesting that no consistent preference in movement direction may be advantageous when searching for food on a larger scale.
Significance statement
Many animals across a wide range of taxa will consistently prefer to use either their left or right side to complete certain types of tasks. Such asymmetric behaviors may be associated with asymmetries in brain structure and are well documented in birds. Yet, mountain chickadees did not show similar directional biases in their movement-based decision-making. Furthermore, biases in their movement were not associated with overall cognitive performance. These null results suggest that while strong left or right preferences may be beneficial in certain contexts, such biases might not be advantageous while foraging for food on a larger scale.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available in the Mendeley Data Repository, https://doi.org/10.17632/jsgv8jp8cp.2.
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to the staff of the Sagehen Experimental Forest and Sagehen Creek Field Station (University of California, Berkeley) for assistance. Thank you to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and criticisms that improved the manuscript.
Funding
This work was supported by the NSF IOS1856181 and IOS2119824 to VVP. LMB and BRS were supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
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LMB: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, formal analysis, writing—original draft preparation, writing—reviewing and editing, and visualization. VKH: methodology, investigation, data curation, and writing—reviewing and editing. BRS: investigation, and writing—reviewing and editing. AMP: investigation and writing—reviewing and editing. ESB: methodology and writing—reviewing and editing. VVP: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, writing—original draft preparation, writing—reviewing and editing, funding acquisition, project administration, and supervision.
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The use of animals adhered to the guidelines set forth by the University of Nevada Reno Institutional Care and Use Committee (Protocol 00818, 00046, and 00603) and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (Permit D-0011776516–4). Banding wild birds adhered to guidelines set forth by the U.S. Geological Survey Bird Banding Laboratory (Federal Bird Banding Permit 22878). To the best of our knowledge, no birds were harmed by the collection of these data, and birds were only handled for a few minutes during banding. We detected no negative effects of using PIT-tags and color bands during our study.
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Benedict, L.M., Heinen, V.K., Sonnenberg, B.R. et al. Food-caching chickadees do not exhibit directional bias when learning a spatial task. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 77, 4 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-022-03275-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-022-03275-6