Behavioral responses to a series of similar but distinct novel objects in house sparrows

Generalization refers to the process by which animals assign different stimuli into cognitive categories based on their similarity/dissimilarity to previously experienced stimuli. Stimuli which strongly deviate from previous experience may be avoided due to their novelty (i.e., neophobia), while stimuli which are sufficiently similar to a known/recognized cue may elicit the same response as that cue (i.e., generalization). While generalization has been widely researched, few studies have examined among-individual variance in its expression. Our study quantified among-individual variation in neophobia and generalization in house sparrows (Passer domesticus) by placing a series of different objects next to each subject’s food source on successive days and measuring the subject’s latency to approach the food source in the presence vs. absence of each object. Similarly to previous work, we found that house sparrows are neophobic on average and exhibit significant among-individual variance i..., Subjects and acclimation
We conducted experiments on 10 female and 8 male house sparrows (Passer domesticus) at the University of Kentucky’s Ecological Research and Education Center (38°4'52\", -84°28'14”). We captured these subjects using mist nets from two sites in Lexington, KY: a backyard in a suburban housing development (38°0'28\", -84°30'39\") and the seed warehouse of a farm store in an industrial/commercial area (38°0'52\", -84°26'29\"). Eleven of the subjects (5 female, 6 male) we captured between January and March 2017 and assayed between May and September 2017, while the other seven (5 female, 2 male) we captured and assayed during the same time frames in 2018. All subjects were developmentally adults (i.e. after hatch year), but their exact ages were unknown. The choice of 18 subjects was based on practical constraints including the amount of available aviary space and the time needed to conduct a full set of behavioral assays; no a priori sample size calculation was conducted. ..., Microsoft Excel is required to open our main data file (“Novelty_Data_DRYAD_version.xlsx”); open-source alternatives are Google Sheets and Microsoft Office Excel Online. Our ReadMe file (“ReadMe.txt”) may be opened in any text editor.