Range, F., Bugnyar, T., Schlogl, C., & Kotrschal, K. (2006). Individual and sex differences in learning abilities of ravens. Behav. Process., 73(1), 100–106.
Abstract: Behavioral and physiological characteristics of individuals within the same species have been found to be stable across time and contexts. In this study, we investigated individual differences in learning abilities and object and social manipulation to test for consistency within individuals across different tasks. Individual ravens (Corvus corax) were tested in simple color and position discrimination tasks to establish their learning abilities. We found that males were significantly better in the acquisition of the first discrimination task and the object manipulation task, but not in any of the other tasks. Furthermore, faster learners engaged less often in manipulations of conspecifics and exploration of objects to get access to food. No relationship between object and social manipulation and reversal training were found. Our results suggest that individual differences in regard to the acquisition of new tasks may be related to personalities or at least object manipulation in ravens.
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Boughner, R. L., & Papini, M. R. (2006). Appetitive latent inhibition in rats: preexposure performance does not predict conditioned performance. Behav. Process., 72(1), 42–51.
Abstract: Nonreinforced preexposure to a conditioned stimulus impairs subsequent conditioning with that stimulus. The goal of these studies was to assess the extent to which acquisition performance could be predicted from preexposure performance using a correlational approach. For both preexposure and autoshaping, four measures of performance were computed, including overall average lever pressing, lever pressing in the initial session, percentage change in lever pressing, and slopes. These measures were correlated in a large sample of rats trained in an autoshaping situation. None of the three measures of autoshaping performance was consistently predicted by any of the three measures of preexposure performance. These results are consistent with the view that latent inhibition is not reducible to long-term habituation.
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Lafferty, K. D. (2005). Look what the cat dragged in: do parasites contribute to human cultural diversity? Behav. Process., 68(3), 279–282.
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