Search
Presentation Details
| Infection and the impairment of learning and problem-solving in wild-caught crows |
| Andrea Townsend, Sophie Argay, Jessica Eccleston, Julia Brown. Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, United States |
Infectious disease may lead to the impairment of cognitive performance, but little is known about how susceptibility to impairment varies among cognitive abilities. Here, we examine the effects of a bacterial pathogen,�Campylobacter jejuni, on three cognitive abilities—associative learning, problem solving, and spatial memory—in wild-caught American crows. Cognitive performance was lower for infected crows on two of the three tasks: infected crows made more mistakes on a color association test and were less likely to solve a string-pulling test than uninfected crows. Spatial memory, however, did not differ between infected and uninfected birds. �Although infected birds were not less active than uninfected birds, they consumed fewer calories when food was offered�ad libitum, suggesting that poor cognitive performance may have been at least partly due to lower motivation to attempt tasks with a food reward. Overall, these data suggest that infection can impair performance on tests of both fundamental and complex cognitive abilities, but that spatial memory may be relatively resilient to infection. |