title: Prenatal learning in an Australian songbird: habituation and individual discrimination in superb fairy-wren embryos.
abstract: Embryos were traditionally considered to possess limited learning abilities because of the immaturity of their developing brains. By contrast, neonates from diverse species show behaviours dependent on prior embryonic experience. Stimulus discrimination is a key component of learning and has been shown by a handful of studies in non-human embryos. Superb fairy-wren embryos (Malurus cyaneus) learn a vocal password that has been taught to them by the attending female during incubation. The fairy-wren embryos use the learned element as their begging call after hatching to solicit more parental feeding. In this study, we test whether superb fairy-wren embryos have the capacity to discriminate between acoustical stimuli and whether they show non-associative learning. We measured embryonic heart rate response using a habituation/dishabituation paradigm with eggs sourced from nests in the wild. Fairy-wren embryos lowered their heart rate in response to the broadcasts of conspecific versus heterospecific calls, and in response to the calls of novel conspecific individuals. Thus, fairy-wrens join humans as vocal-learning species with known prenatal learning and individual discrimination.
authors.affiliation: School of Biological Sciences, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide 5001, Australia.
authors.forename: Diane
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Colombelli-Négrel
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY 10065, USA.
authors.forename: Mark E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Hauber
authors.affiliation: School of Biological Sciences, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide 5001, Australia sonia.kleindorfer@flinders.edu.au.
authors.forename: Sonia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kleindorfer
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000818:Animals; D001315:Australia; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006339:Heart Rate; D007858:Learning; D020308:Songbirds / Q000196:embryology / Q000502:physiology*; D014828:Vocalization, Animal
keywords: Malurus cyaneus; embryonic learning; prenatal discrimination; songbirds