Avian Behavior as a Window on Learning and Cognition

Birds are a highly successful group of reptiles that have colonized most ecological niches on earth. In parallel with mammals, birds have evolved big brains and sophisticated behavioral adaptations. Early differences between the avian and mammalian lineages put birds and mammals on separate evolutionary paths. In particular, flight has been an important driver of the evolution of cognitive abilities in birds, in part because it requires sensory and behavioral adaptations to fast movement in a three dimensional space, and confers advantages to spatial learning and memory. However, convergent evolution across birds and mammals has led to shared aspects of life history and physiology, such as long childhood, extensive parental care and warmbloodedness, as well as common behavioral and cognitive traits. These include complex social interactions and relationships, diverse forms of learning, memory and cultural transmission, advanced cognitive capacities such as numerosity, tool use and construction, and even play and creativity.

Interestingly, convergent evolution is especially pronounced between birds and humans - in some ways, birds are more similar to humans than most mammals, including other primates. Like humans, birds rely on vision and hearing as their prime sensory modalities rather than on olfaction. In addition, some species learn their vocalizations, and exhibit behaviors resembling human musicality, such as the ability to entrain to rhythmic stimuli. These similarities often make birds appropriate model systems for investigating human traits that are rare or even unique among mammals. Furthermore, probably due to selective pressures imposed by flight, birds brains’ are efficiently packed, allowing for extensive “computational power” in small bodies, which makes birds more convenient to study than mammals of equivalent cognitive abilities.

The study of bird behaviors, and their underlying neural mechanisms, has contributed immensely to the understanding of learning and cognition. Notable examples include studies of filial imprinting, spatial learning and memory, associative learning, vocal learning and vocal culture, cognitive problem solving and the formation of abstract mental representations. These studies, however, have typically been considered within the context of their specific fields. In this research topic, we hope to highlight the scope of studies of avian behavior, with the aim of facilitating communication across fields.

We solicit contributions from any area of avian learning and cognition that focus on behavior, including studies of neural mechanisms with a significant behavioral component. We particularly encourage contributions that attempt to make new connections among cognitive domains, and contributions that include theoretical modeling. We welcome articles of the following types: original research, methods, review, hypothesis and theory, perspective, and conceptual analysis.