Abstract
Social cognitive mechanisms are central to understanding developmental abnormalities, such as autistic spectrum disorder. Peer relations besides parent-infant or pair-bonding interactions are pivotal social relationships that are especially well developed in humans. Cognition of familiarity forms the basis of peer socialization. Domestic chick (Gallus gallus) studies have contributed to our understanding of the developmental process in sensory-motor cognition but many processes remain unknown. In this report, we used chicks, as they are precocial birds, and we could therefore focus on peer interaction without having to consider parenting. The subject chick behavior towards familiar and unfamiliar reference peers was video-recorded, where the subject and the reference were separated by either an opaque or transparent wall. Spectrogram and behavior correlation analyses based on principal component analysis, revealed that chicks elicited an intermediate contact call and a morphologically different distress call, more frequently towards familiar versus unfamiliar chicks in acoustic only conditions. When both visual and acoustic cues were present, subject chicks exhibited approaching and floor pecking behavior, while eliciting joyful (pleasant) calls, irrespective of whether reference peers were familiar or unfamiliar. Our result showed that chicks recognized familiarity using acoustic cues and expressed cognition through modified distress calls. These finding suggests that peer affiliation may be established by acoustic recognition, independent of visual face recognition, and that eventually, both forms of recognition are integrated, with modulation of acoustic recognition.
Highlights
Neurobiological understanding of socio-emotional cognition is crucial to diagnosis and therapeutic intervention in social-domain specific developmental disorders, such as autistic spectrum disorders and other psychiatric illnesses
We found no significant differences in subject chick call behavior when both visual and acoustic cues were present in the meetings with familiar and unfamiliar reference chicks
The subjects showed very similar behavior towards familiar and unfamiliar chicks in the v+a+ context. These combined results suggested that dj-call was a unique behavior elicited from subject chicks toward familiar peers in the v2a+ context
Summary
Neurobiological understanding of socio-emotional cognition is crucial to diagnosis and therapeutic intervention in social-domain specific developmental disorders, such as autistic spectrum disorders and other psychiatric illnesses. The neuronal substrates relevant to CONSPEC and CONLERN comprise the subcortical facerecognition route, which provides a developmental foundation for what later becomes the adult cortical ‘social brain’ network [10]. It is uncertain how early neuronal substrates for social affiliation are integrated as part of the social brain network, a process that is crucial to understanding socio-emotional development and its disorders. We developed a peer social affiliation chick model, covering a series of developmental stages, and focused on familiarity cognition using acoustic cues
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