The stories the Mynas tell us about learning. and Slow

Innovative Birds Are Also Less Flexible Learners

• BY MARY BATES
• When you look at innovation on the level of an entire species, it’s a pretty valuable attribute. Innovation allows a population of animals to adjust to new or changing environments. But you can also measure innovation at the level of individual animals. Some particular animals are more creative and innovative than others. So you would expect individuals more prone to innovation to be more behaviorally flexible and better able to adjust to changing environmental conditions than those with lower innovation propensity, right? Wrong.
  A new study demonstrates that in Indian mynas, what holds for the species as a whole does not hold for each individual animal. More innovative birds learned a new task more quickly, but were slower to change their behavior in response to a changing environment. Innovators were fast, but not flexible, learners.
  Avian I.Q. Tests
  Andrea Griffin and her colleagues from the University of Newcastle, Australia, chose myna birds for their study because they are opportunistic, highly adaptable birds; Griffin says they are classified as one of the top 100 most invasive species in the world by the IUCN. Such a successful invader would be expected to possess excellent learning capabilities.
  Griffin and her colleagues tested mynas on two types of tasks. The first, a novel extractive foraging task, measured innovative performance. Each bird faced three different tests of innovation propensity from five possible tests. These included a piece of paper that had to be pulled out of a plastic champagne flute to access the food inside and a petri dish with an inverted lid that could only be lifted by grabbing a hook attached to its center.
  
  Photo: Marie Diquelou
  The second type of task is known as a serial discrimination reversal learning test. The researchers trained the birds to sit on a perch in front of a pecking key that lit up. The birds first learned that when the pecking key lit up red, they could peck it to receive food, whereas a blue light would yield no food reward. Once they learned this discrimination, the meaning of the two colors was reversed: now pecking the blue light would deliver food and pecking the red light would lead to no reward. After learning this new discrimination, the colors switched again — and again and again, for a total of four successive reversals.
  Griffin and her colleagues expected the birds that aced the test of innovation to also be able to adapt when the conditions that lead to their food reward were changed. But while faster innovators learned the initial discrimination (that one cue signaled food and the other did not), they were also slower to change their behavior when the meanings of the food cues were reversed.
  Different Lifestyles, Different Learning Styles
  What does this mean for the intelligence of mynas? While a universally agreed upon definition of intelligence remains elusive, one hallmark of intelligence is flexibility. If innovation measures cognition, one would expect it to be correlated not only with learning but also with flexibility. But that’s not what these researchers found.
  Griffin and her colleagues suggest that individual innovation propensity may be associated with certain personality types. Innovative, but inflexible, mynas have a faster lifestyle, exploring their environment quickly and superficially. Slower-paced mynas explore their environment more slowly but also more carefully and are more likely to adopt new behaviors when environmental conditions change. Fast, inflexible mynas may favor speed over accuracy relative to slower, flexible mynas. “These two personality types have been found in other bird species and are thought to be adapted to stable environments (fast paced individuals) and variable environments (slow paced individuals), respectively,” says Griffin.
  
  Photo: Marie Diquelou
  There is still the matter of why more innovative species are more behaviorally flexible, and yet more innovativeindividuals are less flexible. Griffin and her colleagues suggest that both personality types are associated with increased neural processing power and larger relative brain size, and a species with high neural processing power is made up of individuals of both personality types.
  When researchers study innovation in species in the wild, they are counting innovative behaviors performed by the innovators themselves (the fast learners) as well as innovative behaviors performed by individuals that have copied them (the slow, flexible learners). “There is evidence to support the idea that slow paced individuals are also more attentive to social information, so our idea fits with this, too,” Griffin says. “This would explain why species with high processing power have high innovations, and high flexibility: The flexible individuals and the innovative individuals are different individuals within the same species.”
  So it takes all kinds in a myna bird population. Each personality type has its strengths and contributes to the success of the population as a whole.
  
  
  Reference:
  Griffin, A. S., Guez, D., Lermite, F., and Patience, M. (2013). Tracking Changing Environments: Innovators Are Fast, but Not Flexible Learners. PLoS ONE 8(12): e84907. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0084907.
  
  Mary Bates is a freelance science writer interested in the brains and behavior of animals. She earned her PhD studying bat echolocation and has written for Psychology Today, Scientific American's Mind Matters blog, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. You can follow her onTwitter.
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