Colour cues or spatial cues? Context-dependent preferences in the European greenfinch (Carduelis chloris)

Abstract

Using featural cues such as colour to identify ephemeral food can increase foraging efficiency. Featural cues may change over time however; therefore, animals should use spatial cues to relocate food that occurs in a temporally stable position. We tested this hypothesis by measuring the cue preferences of captive greenfinches Carduelis chloris when relocating food hidden in a foraging tray. In these standardised associative learning trials, greenfinches favoured colour cues when returning to a foraging context that they had encountered before only once (“one-trial test”) but switched to spatial cues when they had encountered that scenario on ten previous occasions (“repeated-trial test”). We suggest that repeated encounters generated a context in which individuals had a prior expectation of temporal stability, and hence context-dependent cue selection. Next, we trained birds to find food in the absence of colour cues but tested them in the presence of visual distracters. Birds were able to learn spatial cues after one encounter, but only when visual distracters were identical in colouration. When a colourful distracter was present in the test phase, cue selection was random. Unlike the first one-trial test, birds were not biased towards this colourful visual distracter. Together, these results suggest that greenfinches are able to learn both cue types, colour cue biases represent learning, not simply distraction, and spatial cues are favoured over colour cues only in temporally stable contexts.