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The effect of social information from live demonstrators compared to video playback on blue tit foraging decisions

Video playback provides a promising method to study social interactions, and the number of video playback experiments has been growing in recent years. Using videos has advantages over live individuals as it increases the repeatability of demonstrations, and enables researchers to manipulate the fea...

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Autores principales: Hämäläinen, Liisa, Rowland, Hannah M., Mappes, Johanna, Thorogood, Rose
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6836752/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31720117
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7998
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author Hämäläinen, Liisa
Rowland, Hannah M.
Mappes, Johanna
Thorogood, Rose
author_facet Hämäläinen, Liisa
Rowland, Hannah M.
Mappes, Johanna
Thorogood, Rose
author_sort Hämäläinen, Liisa
collection PubMed
description Video playback provides a promising method to study social interactions, and the number of video playback experiments has been growing in recent years. Using videos has advantages over live individuals as it increases the repeatability of demonstrations, and enables researchers to manipulate the features of the presented stimulus. How observers respond to video playback might, however, differ among species, and the efficacy of video playback should be validated by investigating if individuals’ responses to videos are comparable to their responses to live demonstrators. Here, we use a novel foraging task to compare blue tits’ (Cyanistes caeruleus) responses to social information from a live conspecific vs video playback. Birds first received social information about the location of food, and were then presented with a three-choice foraging task where they could search for food from locations marked with different symbols (cross, square, plain white). Two control groups saw only a foraging tray with similar symbols but no information about the location of food. We predicted that socially educated birds would prefer the same location where a demonstrator had foraged, but we found no evidence that birds copied a demonstrator’s choice, regardless of how social information was presented. Social information, however, had an influence on blue tits’ foraging choices, as socially educated birds seemed to form a stronger preference for a square symbol (against two other options, cross and plain white) than the control birds. Our results suggest that blue tits respond to video playback of a conspecific similarly as to a live bird, but how they use this social information in their foraging decisions, remains unclear.
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spelling pubmed-68367522019-11-12 The effect of social information from live demonstrators compared to video playback on blue tit foraging decisions Hämäläinen, Liisa Rowland, Hannah M. Mappes, Johanna Thorogood, Rose PeerJ Animal Behavior Video playback provides a promising method to study social interactions, and the number of video playback experiments has been growing in recent years. Using videos has advantages over live individuals as it increases the repeatability of demonstrations, and enables researchers to manipulate the features of the presented stimulus. How observers respond to video playback might, however, differ among species, and the efficacy of video playback should be validated by investigating if individuals’ responses to videos are comparable to their responses to live demonstrators. Here, we use a novel foraging task to compare blue tits’ (Cyanistes caeruleus) responses to social information from a live conspecific vs video playback. Birds first received social information about the location of food, and were then presented with a three-choice foraging task where they could search for food from locations marked with different symbols (cross, square, plain white). Two control groups saw only a foraging tray with similar symbols but no information about the location of food. We predicted that socially educated birds would prefer the same location where a demonstrator had foraged, but we found no evidence that birds copied a demonstrator’s choice, regardless of how social information was presented. Social information, however, had an influence on blue tits’ foraging choices, as socially educated birds seemed to form a stronger preference for a square symbol (against two other options, cross and plain white) than the control birds. Our results suggest that blue tits respond to video playback of a conspecific similarly as to a live bird, but how they use this social information in their foraging decisions, remains unclear. PeerJ Inc. 2019-11-04 /pmc/articles/PMC6836752/ /pubmed/31720117 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7998 Text en © 2019 Hämäläinen et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , 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) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Animal Behavior
Hämäläinen, Liisa
Rowland, Hannah M.
Mappes, Johanna
Thorogood, Rose
The effect of social information from live demonstrators compared to video playback on blue tit foraging decisions
title The effect of social information from live demonstrators compared to video playback on blue tit foraging decisions
title_full The effect of social information from live demonstrators compared to video playback on blue tit foraging decisions
title_fullStr The effect of social information from live demonstrators compared to video playback on blue tit foraging decisions
title_full_unstemmed The effect of social information from live demonstrators compared to video playback on blue tit foraging decisions
title_short The effect of social information from live demonstrators compared to video playback on blue tit foraging decisions
title_sort effect of social information from live demonstrators compared to video playback on blue tit foraging decisions
topic Animal Behavior
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6836752/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31720117
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7998
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