Cognition and reproductive success in cowbirds
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding the relationships between cognitive abilities and fitness is integral to an evolutionary study of brain and behavior. However, these relationships are often difficult to measure and detect. Here we draw upon an opportunistic sample of brown-headed cowbird (Molothrus ater) subjects that had two separate research experiences: First, they engaged in a large series of cognitive tests in David Sherry's Lab in the Advanced Facility for Avian Research (AFAR) at Western University, then subsequently moved to the Field Avian Research Megalab (FARM) at Wilfrid Laurier University where they lived in large breeding flocks in aviaries with other wild-caught cowbirds. Thus, we had extensive measures of cognitive abilities, breeding behavior, and reproductive success for these birds. We report here, for the fist time, the surprisingly strong connections we found among these different measures. Female cowbirds' spatial cognitive abilities correlated positively with how intensely they were courted by males, and with their overall egg production. Males' spatial cognition correlated positively with their ability to engage in singing contests ("countersinging") with other males. In addition, a separate non-spatial cognitive ability correlated positively with the attractiveness of the songs they sung. In sum, these results suggest the cognitive skills assessed in the lab were strongly connected to breeding behavior and reproductive success. Moreover, since certain cognitive abilities related to different aspects of breeding success, it suggests that cognitive modules may have specialized adaptive value, but also that these specialized skills may interact and influence fitness in surprising ways.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it