Close up of a herring gull, with red around the yellow eye, and a red spot on the lower beak
🚨Not one, but two papers now out on response inhibition (also called motoric self-regulation or inhibitory control in the field of animal cognition). Many studies find no link between individual performance on different tasks supposedly measuring response inhibition.
1/6
Happy to share that our work on direct & indirect social effects in producer-scrounger behaviours was recently published in JEB:
academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...
@roriwijnhorst.bsky.social @dingemanselab.bsky.social @ali--wilson.bsky.social
Hot off the press 🐣 Do birds have any idea of what their eggs look like? Contrary to our expectations, we show that barn swallows don't, nor do they learn it over time. Yet that doesn't stop them from successfully ejecting foreign eggs!
🔗 Read more here: doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... #OpenAccess
Have you ever wondered how animals were using affective states to cope with our activities?
Here's our NEW PAPER (and my first) that tells you everything you need to know and how much should we feel concerned by the consequences of our activities besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
There is still some time to submit for our Special Collection on social cognition and anthropogenic environments! We are looking forward to hear from you! link.springer.com/collections/... Please do get in touch if you have any questions.
#openaccess #socialcognition
New paper out!
Early-life social instability increases aggression in chickens, but does not affect response inhibition 🐤
We discuss what this means for developmental links between social environments, cognition, and social behaviour, highlighting strong context dependence
Full text: rdcu.be/eYOzC
✨New paper✨
How do juvenile ravens find social groups?
We describe how juvenile common ravens, who have left their natal territories seeking to join non-breeder flocks, use space with respect to other birds, and discuss what this means for social integration.
www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
🎉 Very excited to share that our review on the impact of urbanization on animal social behaviour is out now in Biological Reviews!
We synthesize evidence across taxa to understand how city life reshapes social systems 🏙️🐦🐒🦎🦝🐟
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
@lizabeldm.bsky.social
📢 Our new article entitled “With or without you: common marmoset, Callithrix jacchus, personality expression is mediated by social setting” has just come out *open access* in #AnimalBehaviourJournal! ✨ 🥰🥳🐒 @asab.org
doi.org/10.1016/j.an...
A thread. 😊
1/3 Cooperative hunting in ravens
Brown-necked ravens (C. ruficollis) work together to prevent lizards (U. aegyptia) from entering and blocking their burrow by inflating their bodies using their pointed tails to obstruct the entrance.
(paper; 2010) link.springer.com/article/10.1...
That's amazing!!! Congratulations 🎉
"Unsung Songbirds: Advances in the Study of Corvid Communication" - a new review paper (preprint) https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/10600/ Corvids are amazing, so I'm v pleased to be a small part of this review led by Claudia Wascher and Valerie Dufour. #corvids #bioacoustics
Delighted to be part of this very collaborative venture: The Cooperative-Breeding Database (Co-BreeD), now live: doi.org/10.1111/1365...
Contains data from 450+ populations of 320+ species (and is expandable).
Thanks @benmocha.bsky.social @maikewoith.bsky.social for leading.
@co-breed.bsky.social
Excited to announce that Eli Garcia-Pelegrin and I are co-editing a special collection for Animal Cognition on "Social Cognition in a Human World". Do you study how urbanization, pollution, heat stress, fragmentation, ... affects cognition? We want to hear from you! link.springer.com/collections/...
🧪 Incredible research reveals how greater noctule bats seek out, capture, and eat songbirds--all on the wing. (Also, my first story for @sciencenews.bsky.social!) 🦇🪶☠️ www.sciencenews.org/article/bats...
Adorable 🤩
Visit our website and learn more about the @behavecol.bsky.social conference venue, host city and schedule!
www.isbe2026.com
New @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social paper out today in @royalsociety.org Biology Letters. We found adult jackdaws can learn to tolerate usually bullied or ignored juveniles when they provided information about a new foraging resource.
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
A great tailed grackle, a black slender bird with a long tail, is eating fast food cheese sauce in a parking lot. Photo credit C. Logan
„behavioral flexibility, while helpful in allowing birds to adapt to new environments, is not the primary facilitator for range expansion“
https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/021980/both-flexibility-and-persistence-make-some-birds-successful-human-made-environments
#TheGrackleProject
Congratulations for your PhD ☺️🎉
A young quail in front of a transparent barrier, looking towards a massive bowl of grains and mealworms
This study was a team effort so thank you to: @katywillcox.bsky.social Reinoud Allaert @anneleendewulf.bsky.social Wen Zhang @camilletroisi.bsky.social Sophia Knoch, An Martel, Luc Lens, @fredverb.bsky.social @ecobird.bsky.social
1) Quails raised in small groups had worse inhibition, but no group difference in aggression. 2) Quails more aggressive towards unfamiliar individuals pecked more at the transparent cylinder. Aggression and inhibition are partly linked, but other factors mediate the influence of social group size.
We raised 120 Japanese quails in small groups of 5 or large groups of 15 and evaluated 1) the effect of social group size on response inhibition (inhibitory control, RI) and aggression at a group-level, and 2) whether deficits in inhibition were linked to increased aggression at an individual-level.
New paper out!
To Peck or Not To Peck: The influence of early-life social environment on response inhibition and impulsive aggression in Japanese quails royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
A beautiful, slender, blue corvid picking up a pine cone to extract the seeds
Big thank you to Nanxi Huang for her help with data collection, Abdelrahman Elzayadi for his help with video scoring, and to Debbie Kelly for her guidance and advice!
Picture by the Bandelier National Monument
#corvids #birdcognition #caching
Both species used the trays differently: birds moved their stored seeds around more in the tray given to the thief once the observers were gone, but only when the observers were conspecifics. We then discussed the ability to discriminate between individuals when caching.
We gave the choice to highly-social pinyon jays and non-social Clark’s nutcrackers to store food between two trays that either a thief or a non-thieving observer could have access to. Observers could either be conspecifics or heterospecifics, and their roles were consistent throughout the study.
Late to the party but the last paper of my PhD was published earlier this year!
Pinyon jays (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus) and Clark’s nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana) can discriminate between pilfering and non-pilfering conspecifics, but not between heterospecifics link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Congratulations @meganjthompson.bsky.social
Another great paper!
In our new paper we discuss the coevolution of cognition and sociality (link: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...). It was a pleasure to work on this project with Andoni Sergiou, @josharbon.bsky.social, @inesfuertbauer.bsky.social, @shoalgroup.bsky.social, and @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social!
