Abstract
Filial imprinting is a dedicated learning process that lacks explicit reinforcement. The phenomenon itself is narrowly heritably canalized, but its content, the representation of the parental object, reflects the circumstances of the newborn. Imprinting has recently been shown to be even more subtle and complex than previously envisaged, since ducklings and chicks are now known to select and represent for later generalization abstract conceptual properties of the objects they perceive as neonates, including movement pattern, heterogeneity and inter-component relationships of same or different. Here, we investigate day-old Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) ducklings’ bias towards imprinting on acoustic stimuli made from mallards’ vocalizations as opposed to white noise, whether they imprint on the temporal structure of brief acoustic stimuli of either kind, and whether they generalize timing information across the two sounds. Our data are consistent with a strong innate preference for natural sounds, but do not reliably establish sensitivity to temporal relations. This fits with the view that imprinting includes the establishment of representations of both primary percepts and selective abstract properties of their early perceptual input, meshing together genetically transmitted prior pre-dispositions with active selection and processing of the perceptual input.
Highlights
Newborn nidifugous birds such as ducks and chickens quickly learn to identify their mother and follow her around for protection, warmth and foraging information, a phenomenon known as filial imprinting [1]
–0.25 sound –0.50 and time sound time time discriminating dimension duration between novel sounds), and all pairwise interactions to test for preference (R aov function): Preference Imprint Sound Type þ Imprint Silent Gap Duration þ Test Condition þ [all pairwise interactions]: The interaction plot shown in the electronic supplementary material, Extended figure S4 was built using R function; for details see: https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/ interactions/versions/1.1.3/topics/cat_plot
In the two time-testing conditions, when the sound did not serve as discriminant, but only the duration of the silent gap could identify the target, they displayed a weak overall bias for the target, as would be expected from imprinting on temporal structure, but this bias does not reach statistical reliability across the different sound compositions. This suggests that there may be some sensitivity to the temporal relation that would require further testing, but kind of sound is likely to play a major role
Summary
Newborn nidifugous birds such as ducks and chickens quickly learn to identify their mother and follow her around for protection, warmth and foraging information, a phenomenon known as filial imprinting [1]. Research has shown that (i) sensory pre-dispositions are crucial, facilitating neonates’ orientation towards relevant features of the environment [3,4] and that (ii) abstract concepts can be acquired by ducklings through imprinting [5] These discoveries suggest that imprinted target representations are better treated as multidimensional vectors of perceptual objects’ affordances than as libraries of sensory percepts [6]. Spatial (morphological) properties of perceived objects [10], but the encoding of data along the fourth dimension, time, is relatively less well known [11,12] For this reason, exploring how temporal features of sensory input participate in the representation of imprinting objects should enrich understanding of how imprinting works, while adding evidence for how fundamental is the ability to keep track of events in time (see [13]). Focusing on the duration of silent gaps rather than duration of sounds controls for differences in amount of sound energy, isolating sensitivity to temporal structure
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