Experimental Tests for Measuring Individual Attentional Characteristics in Songbirds

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Attention is at the core of all cognitive processes such as learning, memorization, and categorization. However, quantifying animals’ attention is challenging, and there is still a need to have standardized and easy-to-use tests. This article describes experimental tests aimed to evaluate spontaneous attention of a songbird, the European starling, in response to the presentation of different types of stimuli: visual non-social or social stimuli and auditory hetero or species-specific stimuli. Our results reveal intra-individual variations but also consistency of individual attentional characteristics in the presence of a species-specific stimulus or different auditory stimuli. They demonstrate further that attention is not a uniform concept and may depend upon the modality and the type of stimulus perceived. ABSTRACT: Attention is defined as the ability to process selectively one aspect of the environment over others and is at the core of all cognitive processes such as learning, memorization, and categorization. Thus, evaluating and comparing attentional characteristics between individuals and according to situations is an important aspect of cognitive studies. Recent studies showed the interest of analyzing spontaneous attention in standardized situations, but data are still scarce, especially for songbirds. The present study adapted three tests of attention (towards visual non-social, visual social, and auditory stimuli) as tools for future comparative research in the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris), a species that is well known to present individual variations in social learning or engagement. Our results reveal that attentional characteristics (glances versus gazes) vary according to the stimulus broadcasted: more gazes towards unusual visual stimuli and species-specific auditory stimuli and more glances towards species-specific visual stimuli and hetero-specific auditory stimuli. This study revealing individual variations shows that these tests constitute a very useful and easy-to-use tool for evaluating spontaneous individual attentional characteristics and their modulation by a variety of factors. Our results also indicate that attentional skills are not a uniform concept and depend upon the modality and the stimulus type.