Song Learning & Cognition

Following from our interest in the developmental stress hypothesis, we've tested the idea that developmental stress forges an association between learned attributes of song and various cognitive abilities, which—if true—means that the quality of song learning should be a reliable indicator of male cognitive abilities in general. That is, by mating with a male with well-learned songs, females are choosing a "smarter" mate, which could benefit her directly if that male is a better parent and/or indirectly if cognitive abilities are heritable, providing a reason why females might benefit by mating with a male with well-learned songs. Such does not appear to be the case, however, at least not for song sparrows and swamp sparrows, where instead we've found that different cognitive measures generally do not correlate with each other, nor do they reliably correlate with measures of song learning. There's nothing like real data to crush an otherwise beautiful hypothesis...

Here are some of our papers on song learning, cultural transmission, and cognition:

Searcy WA, Ocampo D & Nowicki S. 2019. Constraints on song type matching in a songbird. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 73: 102 doi:10.1007/s00265-019-2708-6

Lachlan RF, Ratmann O & Nowicki S. 2018. Cultural conformity generates extremely stable traditions in bird song. Nature Communications 9: 2417 doi:10.1038/s41467-018-04728-1

DuBois AL, Nowicki S, Peters S, Rivera-Cáceres KD & Searcy WA. 2018. Song is not a reliable signal of general cognitive ability in a songbird. Animal Behaviour 137: 205-213.

Peters S & Nowicki S. 2017. Overproduction and attrition: the fates of songs memorized during song learning in songbirds. Animal Behaviour 124: 255-261.

Anderson RC, Searcy WA, Peters S, Hughes M, DuBois AL & Nowicki S. 2017. Song learning and cognitive ability are not consistently related in a songbird. Animal Cognition 20: 309-320.