Abstract
Behavioral responses are influenced by knowledge acquired during the lifetime of an individual and by predispositions transmitted across generations. Establishing the origin of knowledge and the role of the unlearned component is a challenging task, given that both learned and unlearned knowledge can orient perception, learning, and the encoding of environmental features since the first stages of life. Ethical and practical issues constrain the investigation of unlearned knowledge in altricial species, including human beings. On the contrary, precocial animals can be tested on a wide range of tasks and capabilities immediately after birth and in controlled rearing conditions. Insects and precocial avian species are very convenient models to dissect the knowledge systems that enable young individuals to cope with their environment in the absence of specific previous experience. We present the state of the art of research on the origins of knowledge that comes from different models and disciplines. Insects have been mainly used to investigate unlearned sensory preferences and prepared learning mechanisms. The relative simplicity of the neural system and fast life cycle of insects make them ideal models to investigate the neural circuitry and evolutionary dynamics of unlearned traits. Among avian species, chicks of the domestic fowl have been the focus of many studies, and showed to possess unlearned knowledge in the sensory, physical, spatial, numerical and social domains. Solid evidence shows the existence of unlearned knowledge in different domains in several species, from sensory and social preferences to the left-right representation of the mental number line. We show how non-mammalian models of cognition, and in particular precocial species, can shed light into the adaptive value and evolutionary history of unlearned knowledge.
Highlights
Precocious knowledge can help naïve individuals in making correct predictions and deciding whether to approach or avoid an object and how to cope with a situation encountered for the first time.Evidence of precocious knowledge has been documented in species with a short life span, when learning by trial and error could be too costly
Young human beings know from the earliest stages of their life that a large object cannot be hidden behind a narrower occluder (Aguiar and Baillargeon, 1999, 2002; Chiandetti and Vallortigara, 2011b), that objects maintain their identity in spite of proximal changes on the retina (Wood and Wood, 2015), and continue to exist when occluded (Baillargeon et al, 1985; Regolin et al, 1995), that three dots are different from two (Rugani et al, 2009), 1/4 is different from 3/4 Rugani et al (2014) and 4 is different from 12 (Izard et al, 2009), that an attractive face has two eyes and one mouth (Turati et al, 2002; Rosa-Salva et al, 2010), that cliffs are more dangerous than solid ground (Walk and Gibson, 1961)
While at the peripheral level exposure to the male emitted pheromone cis-vaccenyl acetate produces similar responses in males and females, the behavioral responses are completely different in the two sexes: females increase receptivity to courting males, whereas males show an increase of aggression towards males and suppression of courtship
Summary
Precocious knowledge can help naïve individuals in making correct predictions and deciding whether to approach or avoid an object and how to cope with a situation encountered for the first time. The co-occurrence of early preferences for face-like stimuli, biological motion and self-propelled objects suggests that social species might be endowed with a core knowledge system dedicated to social stimuli (Spelke and Kinzler, 2007; Vallortigara, 2012b).This suggestive hypothesis could be validated by investigating the differences in reactions to social stimuli between breeds and species that require a different degree of parental care soon after birth. Reptiles such as tortoises, which require no post-hatching parental care, are a good model system to understand the adaptive role and evolution of social coreknowledge mechanisms. While it has been showed that adult tortoises have the capability to follow the gaze of conspecifics (Wilkinson et al, 2010), little is known on their early social capabilities
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