Computerized cognitive testing has significantly advanced our understanding of animal cognition by enabling standardized and efficient data collection. This testing has been widely applied to primates, and comparable research in marine mammals is limited. The present study investigated planning behavior in California sea lions (Zalophus californianus) using a maze task with the Enclosure Video Enrichment (EVE) system at the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program (MMP). The purpose was to determine the extent to which sea lions employ planning strategies when navigating mazes of varying difficulty. Seven adult male sea lions completed 200 testing trials, consisting of 100 unique layouts separated into four trial blocks that were repeated randomly across eight testing sessions. Success rates and response patterns were analyzed to assess cognitive flexibility, planning, and problem-solving strategies. The successful performance of the task required the use of short-term forward planning to avoid obstacles and reach the target. Results demonstrated moderate success rates without improvement across repeated exposures, indicating limited evidence of planning behavior and learning. These findings expand comparative cognition research by emphasizing how adaptations and environmental conditions influence species-specific cognition.
Insects exhibit flexible memory processes, yet current models often confine these modulations to discrete, reinforced events. During navigation, animals can learn to associate locations with resources or aversive events. However, such events occur sporadically within an otherwise continuous behavioral process involving latent learning. This raises a fundamental question for insect cognition: can insects continuously update visual memories during navigation? We show that navigating bull ants (Myrmecia) dynamically revalue visual memories en-route, even in the absence of any motivational change or external reinforcement. Using a trackball system that prevented visual progress, we found that nest-view attraction declined over time, consistent with a gradual extinction of these otherwise life-long attractive visual memories. These memory updates were view-specific, independent of path integrator state, and persisted after 24-hours, indicating the involvement of long-term memory processes. However, brief exposure to a novel visual scene was sufficient to partially restore nest-views attraction, showing that this extinction-like process is labile, and the original memories are preserved. Unlike classic paradigms, this decline appears to operate as a continuous, time-dependent process without reward-omission or prediction error; whereas memory reinstatement is triggered by discrete visual changes. We propose that these dynamics may reflect parallel memory processes in the insect mushroom bodies, where temporal estimates of view exposure could drive this extinction-like decline and novel view detection gates memory recovery.
Birds possess remarkable visual object classification abilities. Objects in nature often contain multiple redundant cues (e.g., color and shape). Previous work has shown that pigeons prefer color over shape for target classification, but it remains unknown whether they rely primary on color or whether shape also provides discriminative information when both cues are available. To address this, we trained pigeons on single-cue (color-only or shape-only) discrimination tasks and then transferred them to multi-cue (color + shape) tasks, while simultaneously recording neural responses from the entopallium. Behaviorally, shifting from single-color to multi-cue produced no change in recognition accuracy, whereas shifting from single-shape to multi-cue significantly improved accuracy. This pattern suggests that color provided the primary behavioral driver, with shape adding limited detectable benefit under these specific conditions. Neurophysiologically, most recording sites in the entopallial showed stronger local field potential responses to color than to shape cues, and local functional connectivity was less dense under multi-cue than single-cue images. Together, these findings suggest that, under the present redundant-cue paradigm, pigeons exhibited a preferential reliance on color over shape for object recognition a processing bias that may reflect an efficient strategy when one cue is sufficient for accurate classification. These findings contribute to our understanding of how birds process redundant visual information under conditions of cue redundancy.
Innovative behaviors in non-human animals have been proposed as indicators of flexible thinking. Although dolphins have demonstrated creativity under stimulus control, these paradigms relied on human-directed tasks and may have overlooked spontaneous expression. This study evaluated whether object play, an unprompted behavior, could serve as a proxy for dolphin creativity by examining object play in bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in managed care and wild Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis). Video data were coded for object play events and analyzed for fluency (behavioral diversity and frequency) and elaboration (sequential organization), with consideration of object type and social context. In managed care, object play differed for bottlenose dolphins significantly by sex and age. Males accounted for 66.2
Abstract In coral reef ecosystems, anthropogenic change is rapidly altering habitat structure, but the consequences for fish cognition remain poorly understood. We tested whether structural habitat complexity influences spatial learning and strategy use in the humbug damselfish ( Dascyllus aruanus ). Juveniles were reared in aquaria containing either high- or low-complexity coral structures and trained in a T-maze task, requiring the use of egocentric (turn-based) and/or allocentric (landmark-based) strategies to locate a reward. Performance was assessed using the number of trials to reach a learning criterion and latency to make correct decisions. Probe trials with conflicting cues assessed navigation strategies. Turn direction was the strongest predictor of performance. Fish trained to turn left reached criterion in fewer trials and consistently relied on egocentric strategies, indicative of a lateralisation bias. In contrast, right-turning fish increasingly relied on landmark cues during probe trials and made faster decisions when doing so, suggesting that allocentric strategies reduced the cost of acting against intrinsic turn biases. Contrary to our expectation, environmental complexity did not affect the number of trials required to reach criterion. However, high-complexity fish located the reward faster during early training and showed longer decision latencies during probe trials, suggesting greater sensitivity to landmark information when cues conflicted. Our results suggest that spatial task performance may be shaped more by turn biases and strategy use than by environmental complexity alone, highlighting the importance of considering intrinsic behavioural constraints when interpreting spatial cognition.
