HS6LCC7G

8517

30 avril 2021 13:53

8 décembre 2023 12:04

Different personalities may lead to different ways of processing environmental information; however, the re-lationship between personality and cognition is not fully understood as studies on diverse species presentcontrasting results. As there is great within-flock variability of outdoor ranging behavior in free-range broilerchickens, we tested whether and how ranging behavior impacts on individual spatial memory abilities. Theexperiment was conducted on oneflock (n = 200) reared in the same conditions throughout the study, to si-mulate on-farm situations. As the ranging behavior was stable over time, we compared two distinct groups ofmale chickens: one that visited the range more (High rangers) and one that was more prone to staying in thepoultry house (Low rangers). To test the spatial memory, individuals (n = 30) went through two main phases inan arena with 8 cups. For the familiarization phase, individuals were submitted to one trial per day, for sevendays, to a situation where all eight cups were baited with mealworms. Animals had to reach a criterion of 5 cupsvisited out of 8 to advance to the next phase. For the spatial test, only four cups were baited and systematicallyplaced at the same location. This last phase comprised two trials per individual per day, for nine days. Duringthese two phases, latency to visit cups and the number of visits and revisits of all cups were recorded. Low rangerchickens took less time to attain the pre-established threshold of visiting 5 cups out of 8, over the familiarizationphase. During the spatial test, the latency to visit four cups decreased between the within-day trials for lowranger chickens and increased for high ranger chickens. Moreover, in the within-day trial analysis, low rangerchickens exhibited an improvement on spatial memory and better spatial memory compared to high rangerchickens. Different speed-accuracy trade-offs may explain these differences between low and high rangerchickens and the way individuals interact and solve the task. Our study strengthens the scientific evidencerelating consistent individual differences in behavior, with the ranging behavior of free-range chickens, andcognitive performance during a spatial memory task

None

• behavior
• chicken
• free range

Elsevier Behavioural Processes

166

01/09/2019

1 septembre 2019