Developmental context has been shown to influence learning abilities later in life, namely through experiments with nutritional and/or environmental constraints (i.e. lack of enrichment). However, little is known about the extent to which opportunities for learning affect the development of animal cognition, even though such opportunities are known to influence human cognitive development. We exposed young zebra finches ( Taenopygia guttata ) ( n = 26) to one of three experimental conditions, i.e. an environment where (i) colour cues reliably predicted the presence of food (associative learning), (ii) a combination of two-colour cues reliably predicted the presence of food (conditional learning), or (iii) colour cues were non-informative (control). After conducting two different discrimination tasks, our results showed that experience with predictive cues can cause increased choice accuracy and decision-making speed. Our first learning task showed that individuals in the associative learning treatment outperformed the control treatment, while task 2 showed that individuals in the conditional learning treatment had shorter latencies when making choices compared with the control treatment. We found no support for a speed–accuracy trade-off. This dataset provides a rare longitudinal and experimental examination of the effect of predictive versus non-predictive cues during development on the cognition of adult animals. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals’.

中文翻译：

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学习机会对学习和决策发展的影响：雀形目鸟类的实验

发展环境已被证明会影响以后的学习能力，即通过营养和/或环境限制（即缺乏丰富）的实验。然而，人们对学习机会在多大程度上影响动物认知发展知之甚少，尽管已知学习机会会影响人类认知发展。我们暴露了年轻的斑胸草雀（斑蝽) (n= 26）三种实验条件之一，即（i）颜色线索可靠地预测食物的存在（联想学习），（ii）两种颜色线索的组合可靠地预测食物的存在（条件学习）的环境，或 (iii) 颜色提示不提供信息（对照）。在进行两项不同的辨别任务后，我们的结果表明，预测线索的经验可以提高选择准确性和决策速度。我们的第一个学习任务表明，联想学习治疗中的个体优于对照治疗，而任务 2 表明，与对照治疗相比，条件学习治疗中的个体在做出选择时的潜伏期更短。我们发现不支持速度与准确度的权衡。该数据集提供了罕见的纵向和实验检查，以研究发育过程中预测线索与非预测线索对成年动物认知的影响。本文是主题“生命史与学习：童年、看护和老年如何塑造人类和其他动物的认知和文化”的一部分。