Development rate rather than social environment influences cognitive performance in Australian black field crickets, Teleogryllus commodus
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Zoology
- Keywords
- developmental plasticity, learning, maze, social environment, cognitive performance
- Copyright
- © 2017 Anderson et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Development rate rather than social environment influences cognitive performance in Australian black field crickets, Teleogryllus commodus. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2728v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2728v1
Abstract
Cognitive functioning is vital for enabling animals of all taxa to optimise their chances of survival and reproductive success. Learning and memory in particular are drivers of many evolutionary processes. The field of cognitive ecology explores how the environment can affect investment into cognitive capacity and learning ability. In this study, we examine how developmental plasticity can affect cognitive ability by exploring the role of early social environment on influencing problem solving ability and learning of female black field crickets, Teleogryllus commodus. We used two learning paradigms, an analog of the Morris water maze and a novel linear maze, to examine cognitive differences between individuals reared in two acoustic treatments: silence or calling. Although there was no evidence of learning or memory, individuals that took longer to mature solved the Morris water maze more quickly. This suggests that increased investment into cognitive development is likely associated with increased development time during immature stages. Inconsistent individual performance and motivation during the novel linear maze task highlights the difficulties of designing ecologically relevant learning tasks within a lab setting. The role of experimental design in understanding cognitive ability and learning in more natural circumstances is discussed.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.