When perceptual laterality vanishes with curiosity: A study in dolphins and starlings

A transdisciplinary view on curiosity beyond linguistic humans: animals, infants, and artificial intelligence

Curiosity is a core driver for life-long learning, problem-solving and decision-making. In a broad sense, curiosity is defined as the intrinsically motivated acquisition of novel information. Despite a decades-long history of curiosity research and the earliest human theories arising from studies of laboratory rodents, curiosity has mainly been considered in two camps: 'linguistic human' and 'other'. This is despite psychology being heritable, and there are many continuities in cognitive capacities across the animal kingdom. Boundary-pushing cross-disciplinary debates on curiosity are lacking, and the relative exclusion of pre-linguistic infants and non-human animals has led to a scientific impasse which more broadly impedes the development of artificially intelligent systems modelled on curiosity in natural agents. In this review, we synthesize literature across multiple disciplines that have studied curiosity in non-verbal systems. By highlighting how similar findings have been produced across the separate disciplines of animal behaviour, developmental psychology, neuroscience, and computational cognition, we discuss how this can be used to advance our understanding of curiosity. We propose, for the first time, how features of curiosity could be quantified and therefore studied more operationally across systems: across different species, developmental stages, and natural or artificial agents.

Behavioural responses of threespine stickleback with lateral line asymmetries to experimental mechanosensory stimuli

Behavioural asymmetry, typically referred to as laterality, is widespread among bilaterians and is often associated with asymmetry in brain structure. However, the influence of sensory receptor asymmetry on laterality has undergone limited investigation. Here we use threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) to investigate the influence of lateral line asymmetry on laterality during lab simulations of three mechanosensation-dependent behaviours: predator evasion, prey localization and rheotaxis. We recorded the response of stickleback to impacts at the water surface and water flow in photic conditions and low-frequency oscillations in the dark, across four repeat trials. We then compared individuals' laterality to asymmetry in the number of neuromasts on either side of their body. Stickleback hovered with their right side against the arena wall 57% of the time (P<0.001) in illuminated surface impact trials and 56% of the time in (P=0.085) dark low-frequency stimulation trials. Light regime modulated the effect of neuromast count on laterality, as fish with more neuromasts were more likely to hover with the wall on their right during illumination (P=0.007) but were less likely to do so in darkness (P=0.025). Population level laterality diminished in later trials across multiple behaviours and individuals did not show a consistent side bias in any behaviours. Our results demonstrate a complex relationship between sensory structure asymmetry and laterality, suggesting that laterality is modulated multiple sensory modalities and temporally dynamic.

Experimental Tests for Measuring Individual Attentional Characteristics in Songbirds

Attention is defined as the ability to process selectively one aspect of the environment over others and is at the core of all cognitive processes such as learning, memorization, and categorization. Thus, evaluating and comparing attentional characteristics between individuals and according to situations is an important aspect of cognitive studies. Recent studies showed the interest of analyzing spontaneous attention in standardized situations, but data are still scarce, especially for songbirds. The present study adapted three tests of attention (towards visual non-social, visual social, and auditory stimuli) as tools for future comparative research in the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris), a species that is well known to present individual variations in social learning or engagement. Our results reveal that attentional characteristics (glances versus gazes) vary according to the stimulus broadcasted: more gazes towards unusual visual stimuli and species-specific auditory stimuli and more glances towards species-specific visual stimuli and hetero-specific auditory stimuli. This study revealing individual variations shows that these tests constitute a very useful and easy-to-use tool for evaluating spontaneous individual attentional characteristics and their modulation by a variety of factors. Our results also indicate that attentional skills are not a uniform concept and depend upon the modality and the stimulus type.