Variation in plumage reflectance but not song reflects spatial cognitive performance in black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In seasonally variable environments, enhanced cognitive abilities may allow animals to adjust their behavior to changing conditions. Nonmigratory food-caching birds, like chickadees, rely on specialized spatial cognition to successfully cache and retrieve food items and survive the winter. Previous studies have linked spatial cognitive performance in chickadees to enhanced fitness, including survival and reproduction; however, it remains unknown whether females assess male cognitive ability via direct observation or secondary sexual traits. In this study, we investigated whether variation in common secondary sexual traits of songbirds, song and plumage, serve as indicators of cognitive ability in black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) when accounting for dominance rank. To explore this, we brought wild male black-capped chickadees into captivity, tested their performance in three spatial cognitive abilities (spatial learning, cognitive flexibility, and long-term retention), determined the relative social dominance ranks among all individuals, measured plumage reflectance in six body regions, and recorded their fee-bee songs to assess the relationship between these variables. Our findings show that birds with brighter white plumage and greater contrast between black and white plumage patches showed better spatial learning and memory performance. In contrast, we found no significant associations between cognitive performance and song variation. Our results suggest that females may use some secondary sexual traits as signals for cognitive performance, although, we suggest direct observation may also be important for mate choice involving cognitive ability in chickadees. This work provides insights into female mating decisions, highlighting the complex nature of sexual selection and female preferences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".