ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2021
Food discovery is associated with different reliance on social learning and lower cognitive flexibility across environments in a food-caching bird.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 28 citations in OpenAlex.
- Effectiveness of perches in promoting bird-mediated seed dispersal for natural forest regeneration: a systematic review.Environmental evidence · 2025Pooled it
- Social information use increases with decreasing winter temperature in a passerine bird.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Current predation risk has opposing effects on social learning of foraging locations across two guppy populations.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Spatial memory obviates following behaviour in an information centre of wild fruit bats.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Environmental harshness does not affect the propensity for social learning in great tits, Parus major.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Orangutan males make increased use of social learning opportunities, when resource availability is high.iScience · 2024Article
- Variation in local population size predicts social network structure in wild songbirds.The Journal of animal ecology · 2023Article
- What's in a mate? Social pairing decisions and spatial cognitive ability in food-caching mountain chickadees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- Cultural diffusion dynamics depend on behavioural production rules.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Social dominance has limited effects on spatial cognition in a wild food-caching bird.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Food discovery is associated with different reliance on social learning and lower cognitive flexibility across environments in a food-caching bird.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
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 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social learning is a primary mechanism for information acquisition in social species. Despite many benefits, social learning may be disadvantageous when independent learning is more efficient. For example, searching independently may be more advantageous when food sources are ephemeral and unpredictable. Individual differences in cognitive abilities can also be expected to influence social information use. Specifically, better spatial memory can make a given environment more predictable for an individual by allowing it to better track food sources. We investigated how resident food-caching chickadees discovered multiple novel food sources in both harsher, less predictable high elevation and milder, more predictable low elevation winter environments. Chickadees at high elevation were faster at discovering multiple novel food sources and discovered more food sources than birds at low elevation. While birds at both elevations used social information, the contribution of social learning to food discovery was significantly lower at high elevation. At both elevations, chickadees with better spatial cognitive flexibility were slower at discovering food sources, likely because birds with lower spatial cognitive flexibility are worse at tracking natural resources and therefore spend more time exploring. Overall, our study supported the prediction that harsh environments should favour less reliance on social learning.
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.