Meeting Abstract
When hybridization occurs, selection against hybrids reduces gene flow and maintains species barriers. Although learning and memory are known to play important roles in preventing hybridization, whether they contribute to selection against hybrids is less understood. Further, although hybridization is widespread and cognition is linked to fitness in many taxa, whether and how hybridization affects cognition remains unclear. Our previous research suggests that hybridization leads to reduced cognitive abilities in chickadees. Black-capped (Poecile atricapillus) and Carolina chickadees (P. carolinensis) naturally hybridize, and also rely on learning and memory to cache and retrieve food as an adaptation for overwinter survival. In tests of wild-caught adult chickadees, we found that hybrid chickadees exhibited poorer spatial memory and were less likely to solve a novel problem than their parental species counterparts. Here, we ask whether deficiencies in hybrid cognition persist after controlling for differences in experience and environment during development. We collected hybrid and parental species chickadee nestlings and reared them under common conditions. We tested performance on a series of cognitive tests, including associative spatial learning, reversal learning, and problem solving. Our preliminary results provide insight into the mechanism by which hybridization affects cognition in chickadees. Future work will be necessary to determine whether and how hybridization affects cognition in other taxa, and in turn, the potential for cognition to contribute to postzygotic reproductive isolation more generally.
