Birds are driven to explore based on individual differences, new study finds
Birds are driven to explore based on individual differences, a new study suggests. Things like personal experience and position in the social hierarchy matter more than the species that birds belong to, scientists say.
Scientists wanted to find out what drives some birds to explore more while others have been called neophobic, because they seem not to like new things. For this purpose, researchers form the Messerli Research Institute and the University of Vienna in Austria, the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany and University of Lincoln, UK used crows, parrots and a tablet in a series of experiments devised to test if a bird engages or ignores new technologies.
What they found, after looking at the interactions between species of corvides and parrots with the tablet, was that exploration is driven much more by individual factors like age, because youngsters were more curious than older birds, personal experience and the place the bird had in the social hierarchy of its group.
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“Rather than its species, we found that individual differences have a significant impact upon how quickly a bird begins to explore. This is likely to be due to a combination of the bird’s age, its individual position in the social hierarchy, and its own previous experiences,” said dr .Anna Wilkinson, a specialist in animal cognition from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Lincoln.
Scientists hope that the new findings will lead to a more accurate interpretation of bird behavior in the future.
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