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...

2022-05-06

Connor T. Lambert, Prateek K. Sahu, Christopher B. Sturdy, Lauren M. Guillette

Among-individual variation in performance on cognitive tasks is ubiquitous across species that have been examined, and understanding the evolution of cognitive abilities requires investigating among-individual variation because natural selection acts on individual differences. However, relatively...

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...

2020-01-01

Andres Camacho-Alpízar, Andrea S. Griffin, Lauren M. Guillette

A recent paper by Chen et al. 2019 found that female budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) show a preference for males that are successful problem solvers. Is this result sufficient to conclude that mate choice influences the evolution of cognitive abilities? Here, we consider what we currently...

2015-01-01

Neil McMillan, Allison H. Hahn, Marcia L. Spetch, Christopher B. Sturdy

Though birds have traditionally and colloquially been considered less cognitively complex than mammals, and especially primates, more recent research has consistently refuted these assumptions. We argue that the impressive abilities of birds to navigate and communicate require considerable...

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...

2023-01-01

Kimberley A. Campbell, Marisa Hoeschele, Daniel Mann, Jenna V. Congdon, Erin N. Scully, Shannon K. Mischler, Carolina Montenegro, William D. Service, & Christopher B. Sturdy

Though many forms of animal communication are not reliant on the order in which components of signals are combined to be effective, there is evidence that order does matter for some communication systems. In the light of differential responding to calls of varying note-order observed in...

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....