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Comparative cognition in three understudied ungulate species: European bison, forest buffalos and giraffes

BACKGROUND: Comparative cognition has historically focused on a few taxa such as primates, birds or rodents. However, a broader perspective is essential to understand how different selective pressures affect cognition in different taxa, as more recently shown in several studies. Here we present the...

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Autores principales: Caicoya, Alvaro Lopez, Amici, Federica, Ensenyat, Conrad, Colell, Montserrat
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8218502/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34158081
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12983-021-00417-w
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author Caicoya, Alvaro Lopez
Amici, Federica
Ensenyat, Conrad
Colell, Montserrat
author_facet Caicoya, Alvaro Lopez
Amici, Federica
Ensenyat, Conrad
Colell, Montserrat
author_sort Caicoya, Alvaro Lopez
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Comparative cognition has historically focused on a few taxa such as primates, birds or rodents. However, a broader perspective is essential to understand how different selective pressures affect cognition in different taxa, as more recently shown in several studies. Here we present the same battery of cognitive tasks to two understudied ungulate species with different socio-ecological characteristics, European bison (Bison bonasus) and forest buffalos (Syncerus caffer nanus), and we compare their performance to previous findings in giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis). We presented subjects with an Object permanence task, Memory tasks with 30 and 60 s delays, two inference tasks based on acoustic cues (i.e. Acoustic inference tasks) and a control task to check for the use of olfactory cues (i.e. Olfactory task). RESULTS: Overall, giraffes outperformed bison and buffalos, and bison outperformed buffalos (that performed at chance level). All species performed better in the Object permanence task than in the Memory tasks and one of the Acoustic inference tasks (which they likely solved by relying on stimulus enhancement). Giraffes performed better than buffalos in the Shake full Acoustic inference task, but worse than bison and buffalos in the Shake empty Acoustic inference task. CONCLUSIONS: In sum, our results are in line with the hypothesis that specific socio-ecological characteristics played a crucial role in the evolution of cognition, and that higher fission-fusion levels and larger dietary breadth are linked to higher cognitive skills. This study shows that ungulates may be an excellent model to test evolutionary hypotheses on the emergence of cognition. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12983-021-00417-w.
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spelling pubmed-82185022021-06-23 Comparative cognition in three understudied ungulate species: European bison, forest buffalos and giraffes Caicoya, Alvaro Lopez Amici, Federica Ensenyat, Conrad Colell, Montserrat Front Zool Research BACKGROUND: Comparative cognition has historically focused on a few taxa such as primates, birds or rodents. However, a broader perspective is essential to understand how different selective pressures affect cognition in different taxa, as more recently shown in several studies. Here we present the same battery of cognitive tasks to two understudied ungulate species with different socio-ecological characteristics, European bison (Bison bonasus) and forest buffalos (Syncerus caffer nanus), and we compare their performance to previous findings in giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis). We presented subjects with an Object permanence task, Memory tasks with 30 and 60 s delays, two inference tasks based on acoustic cues (i.e. Acoustic inference tasks) and a control task to check for the use of olfactory cues (i.e. Olfactory task). RESULTS: Overall, giraffes outperformed bison and buffalos, and bison outperformed buffalos (that performed at chance level). All species performed better in the Object permanence task than in the Memory tasks and one of the Acoustic inference tasks (which they likely solved by relying on stimulus enhancement). Giraffes performed better than buffalos in the Shake full Acoustic inference task, but worse than bison and buffalos in the Shake empty Acoustic inference task. CONCLUSIONS: In sum, our results are in line with the hypothesis that specific socio-ecological characteristics played a crucial role in the evolution of cognition, and that higher fission-fusion levels and larger dietary breadth are linked to higher cognitive skills. This study shows that ungulates may be an excellent model to test evolutionary hypotheses on the emergence of cognition. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12983-021-00417-w. BioMed Central 2021-06-22 /pmc/articles/PMC8218502/ /pubmed/34158081 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12983-021-00417-w Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Caicoya, Alvaro Lopez
Amici, Federica
Ensenyat, Conrad
Colell, Montserrat
Comparative cognition in three understudied ungulate species: European bison, forest buffalos and giraffes
title Comparative cognition in three understudied ungulate species: European bison, forest buffalos and giraffes
title_full Comparative cognition in three understudied ungulate species: European bison, forest buffalos and giraffes
title_fullStr Comparative cognition in three understudied ungulate species: European bison, forest buffalos and giraffes
title_full_unstemmed Comparative cognition in three understudied ungulate species: European bison, forest buffalos and giraffes
title_short Comparative cognition in three understudied ungulate species: European bison, forest buffalos and giraffes
title_sort comparative cognition in three understudied ungulate species: european bison, forest buffalos and giraffes
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8218502/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34158081
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12983-021-00417-w
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