Abstract
From the early stages of life, learning the regularities associated with specific objects is crucial for making sense of experiences. Through filial imprinting, young precocial birds quickly learn the features of their social partners by mere exposure. It is not clear though to what extent chicks can extract abstract patterns of the visual and acoustic stimuli present in the imprinting object, and how they combine them. To investigate this issue, we exposed chicks (Gallus gallus) to three days of visual and acoustic imprinting, using either patterns with two identical items or patterns with two different items, presented visually, acoustically or in both modalities. Next, chicks were given a choice between the familiar and the unfamiliar pattern, present in either the multimodal, visual or acoustic modality. The responses to the novel stimuli were affected by their imprinting experience, and the effect was stronger for chicks imprinted with multimodal patterns than for the other groups. Interestingly, males and females adopted a different strategy, with males more attracted by unfamiliar patterns and females more attracted by familiar patterns. Our data show that chicks can generalize abstract patterns by mere exposure through filial imprinting and that multimodal stimulation is more effective than unimodal stimulation for pattern learning.
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Acknowledgements
GV was supported by a grant from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013): Advanced Grant ERC PREMESOR G.A. Number 295517. MJS was supported by the NWO-GW, Grant No. 360.70.452. We thank Francesca Businaro, Matteo Gregori, Lucrezia Lonardo and Sara Peruffo for help in data collection and Stefano Tessari and Antonio Zandonai for support with the laboratory equipment.
Authors’ contributions
EV conceived and designed the study, participated in data collection, analysed the data and drafted the manuscript; MS designed the study, prepared the stimuli, participated in data collection and helped drafting the manuscript; MC prepared the stimuli and helped drafting the manuscript; CTC conceived and designed the study and helped in drafting the manuscript; GV conceived and designed the study and helped in drafting the manuscript. All authors gave final approval for publication.
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Elisabetta Versace and Michelle J. Spierings have contributed equally to this work.
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Versace, E., Spierings, M.J., Caffini, M. et al. Spontaneous generalization of abstract multimodal patterns in young domestic chicks. Anim Cogn 20, 521–529 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-017-1079-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-017-1079-5