As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Wednesday 14 December 2016

Ducklings 'maintain two separate memory banks of visual information'




Date: November 17, 2016
Source: University of Oxford

Scientists from the University of Oxford have shown that newly hatched ducklings that are shown a substitute mother object with only one eye do not recognise it when they have only the other eye available.

Ducklings and other fowl normally learn to follow their mother within a few minutes of seeing her, through a process called imprinting. This process can allow a duckling to learn to identify any moving object presented to it during its 'sensitive' period -- typically within the first week or so after hatching.

In this new study, published in the journal Animal Behaviour, ducklings were initially presented with either a red or a blue duck decoy, which moved in a circular path, while wearing an eyepatch over one eye.

The ducklings 'imprinted' on this maternal surrogate, learning with this first eye to follow the coloured decoy they had been presented with. In subsequent choice tests over the next three hours, each duckling was presented with both the red and blue decoys simultaneously while wearing either no eyepatch, a patch over the same eye as in training, or a patch over the other eye -- the one that had seen the decoy during training.

The ducklings that made their choice with both eyes, or with the same eye with which they had been trained, accurately preferred to follow the original decoy. But the ducklings wearing a patch over the original eye, so that only the naive eye was available during testing, showed no reliable preference between the two decoys.

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