Journal Articles (Psychology)

2020-02-27

Congdon, Jenna V., Hahn, Allison H., Campbell, Kimberley A., Scully, Erin N., Yip, Daniel A., Bayne, Erin M., Sturdy, Christopher B.

Smaller owls and hawks are high-threat predators to small songbirds, like chickadees, in comparison to larger avian predators due to smaller raptors’ agility (Templeton et al. in Proc Natl Acad Sci 104:5479–5482, 2005). The current literature focuses only on high- and low-threat predators. We...

2016-01-01

Campbell, Kimberley A., Sturdy, Christopher B., Hahn, Allison H., Congdon, Jenna V.

Sex differences have been identified in a number of black-capped chickadee vocalizations and in the chick-a-dee calls of other chickadee species [i.e., Carolina chickadees (Poecile carolinensis)]. In the current study, 12 acoustic features in black-capped chickadee chick-a-dee calls were...

2019-01-01

McMillan, Neil, Spetch, Marcia L.

In a two-stimulus visual discrimination choice task with a reversal in reward contingencies midway through each session, pigeons produce a surprising number of anticipatory errors (i.e., responding to the second-correct stimulus before the reversal) based on failure to inhibit timing-based...

2020-07-01

Montenegro, Carolina, Service, William D., Scully, Erin N., Campbell, Kimberley A., Sturdy, Christopher B

Individual recognition is a social behavior that occurs in many bird species. A bird’s ability to discriminate among familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics is critical to avoid wasting resources such as time and energy during social interactions. Black-capped Chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) are...

2016-01-01

Ken A Otter, Christopher B Sturdy, Thibault Grava, Daniel J Mennill, Lauren M Guillette, Laurene M Ratcliffe, Neil McMillan, Kimberley A Campbell, John Hoang, Marisa Hoeschele, Allison H Hahn, Jenna V Congdon

The songs of many songbird species vary geographically, yet, the songs of black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) show remarkable consistency across most of the species’ North American range. Previous research has described subtle variations in the song of this species by comparing songs...

2019-06-06

Ruojing Zhou; Weimin Mou

This study contrasted two hypotheses theorizing the role of the global shape of a boundary in object location memory. People differentiate reference points based on the global shape extracted from the environment configuration and choose appropriate parts for encoding a specific location....

2020-09-21

Jenna V. Congdon, Allison H. Hahn, Kimberley A. Campbell, Erin N. Scully, Daniel A. Yip, Erin M. Bayne, Christopher B. Sturdy

Avian predators vary in their degree-of-threat to chickadees; for example, smaller owls and hawks are of higher threat to chickadees as they can easily maneuver through the trees, while larger predators cannot. We conducted an operant go/no-go discrimination task to investigate the effect of...

2019-12-20

Chamberlain, Jenna, Gagné, Christina L., Spalding, Thomas L.

Three experiments using a spelling error detection task, in which participants were asked to determine whether words have a spelling error, investigated the extent to which morphemes and pseudo-morphemes affect word processing. We compared the processing of transparent compound words (e.g.,...

2016-01-01

Jenna V. Congdon, Allison H. Hahn, Neil McMillan, Marc T. Avey, Christopher B. Sturdy

Chickadees produce many vocalizations, including chick-a-dee calls which they use as a mobbing call in the presence of predators. Previous research has shown that chickadees produce more D notes in their mobbing calls in response to high-threat predators compared to low-threat predators, and may...

2017-04-05

McMillan, Neil, Hahn, Allison H., Congdon, Jenna V., Campbell, Kimberley A., Hoang, J., Scully, Erin N., Spetch, Marcia L., Sturdy, Christopher B.

Chickadees are high-metabolism, non-migratory birds, and thus an especially interesting model for studying how animals follow patterns of food availability over time. Here, we studied whether black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) could learn to reverse their behavior and/or to anticipate...