ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
Prenatal learning in an Australian songbird: habituation and individual discrimination in superb fairy-wren embryos.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 65 citations in OpenAlex.
- Getting Over It: Maternal Stress and Gut Microbiome Manipulations Do Not Affect Rates of Offspring Habituation During Long Bouts of Stress.Journal of experimental zoology. Part A, Ecological and integrative physiology · 2026Article
- The 'seet' danger call: an active nest warning in superb fairy-wrens.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Personality predicts song complexity in superb fairy-wrens.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Social and auditory experience shapes forebrain responsiveness in zebra finches before the sensitive period of vocal learning.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Lasting benefits of embryonic eavesdropping on parent-parent communication.Science advances · 2024Article
- Frog embryos use multiple levels of temporal pattern in risk assessment for vibration-cued escape hatching.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- The Role of the Endogenous Opioid System in the Vocal Behavior of Songbirds and Its Possible Role in Vocal Learning.Frontiers in physiology · 2022Review
- Embryo movement is more frequent in avian brood parasites than birds with parental reproductive strategies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Prenatal auditory learning in avian vocal learners and non-learners.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Adult-like neural representation of species-specific songs in the auditory forebrain of zebra finch nestlings.Developmental neurobiology · 2021Article
- Awareness of danger inside the egg: Evidence of innate and learned predator recognition in cuttlefish embryos.Learning & behavior · 2020Article
- Context learning before birth: evidence from the chick embryo.Biology letters · 2019Article
- Flexible communication within bird families-The consequences of behavioral plasticity for parent-offspring coadaptation.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Prenatal exposure to incubation calls affects song learning in the zebra finch.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Prenatal environment affects embryonic response to song.Biology letters · 2017Article
- Visual Ecology and the Development of Visually Guided Behavior in the Cuttlefish.Frontiers in physiology · 2017Review
- Article
- Female in-nest chatter song increases predation.Biology letters · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Embryos were traditionally considered to possess limited learning abilities because of the immaturity of their developing brains. By contrast, neonates from diverse species show behaviours dependent on prior embryonic experience. Stimulus discrimination is a key component of learning and has been shown by a handful of studies in non-human embryos. Superb fairy-wren embryos (Malurus cyaneus) learn a vocal password that has been taught to them by the attending female during incubation. The fairy-wren embryos use the learned element as their begging call after hatching to solicit more parental feeding. In this study, we test whether superb fairy-wren embryos have the capacity to discriminate between acoustical stimuli and whether they show non-associative learning. We measured embryonic heart rate response using a habituation/dishabituation paradigm with eggs sourced from nests in the wild. Fairy-wren embryos lowered their heart rate in response to the broadcasts of conspecific versus heterospecific calls, and in response to the calls of novel conspecific individuals. Thus, fairy-wrens join humans as vocal-learning species with known prenatal learning and individual discrimination.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.