ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Testing the greater male variability phenomenon: male mountain chickadees exhibit larger variation in reversal learning performance compared with females.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Living on the edge: the evolution of spatial cognition in food-caching chickadees.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Brood-parasitic female cowbirds have better numerical abilities than males on a task resembling nest prospecting behaviour.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Genetic and context-specific effects on individual inhibitory control performance in the guppy (Poecilia reticulata).Journal of evolutionary biology · 2023Article
- What's in a mate? Social pairing decisions and spatial cognitive ability in food-caching mountain chickadees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Variability in energy expenditure is much greater in males than females.Journal of human evolution · 2022Article
- Seasonal variation in reversal learning reveals greater female cognitive flexibility in African striped mice.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Neuroanatomical norms in the UK Biobank: The impact of allometric scaling, sex, and age.Human brain mapping · 2021Article
- Unique features of stimulus-based probabilistic reversal learning.Behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Specialized spatial cognition is associated with reduced cognitive senescence in a food-caching bird.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Spatial cognitive ability is associated with transitory movement speed but not straightness during the early stages of exploration.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Testing the greater male variability phenomenon: male mountain chickadees exhibit larger variation in reversal learning performance compared with females.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The greater male variability phenomenon predicts that males exhibit larger ranges of variation in cognitive performance compared with females; however, support for this pattern has come exclusively from studies of humans and lacks mechanistic explanation. Furthermore, the vast majority of the literature assessing sex differences in cognition is based on studies of humans and a few other mammals. In order to elucidate the underpinnings of cognitive variation and the potential for fitness consequences, we must investigate sex differences in cognition in non-mammalian systems as well. Here, we assess the performance of male and female food-caching birds on a spatial learning and memory task and a reversal spatial task to address whether there are sex differences in mean cognitive performance or in the range of variation in performance. For both tasks, male and female mean performance was similar across four years of testing; however, males did exhibit a wider range of variation in performance on the reversal spatial task compared with females. The implications for mate choice and sexual selection of cognitive abilities are discussed and future directions are suggested to aid in the understanding of sex-related cognitive variation.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.