Meeting Abstract
Learned aspects of song have been shown to affect female mating preferences in a number of species of songbirds, including swamp sparrows (Melospiza georgiana). One explanation for why female songbirds attend to learned song features is that these signal attributes may convey reliable information about the cognitive abilities of males. This idea is based on the fact that brain development—and therefore song learning and the expression of other cognitive abilities—should all be affected during development by the same stressors, in accord with the “developmental stress hypothesis.” We tested whether song is a signal of cognitive ability by relating five measures of song quality to five measures of cognitive performance in a cohort of 49 adult male swamp sparrows whose songs were recorded in the wild and who were then brought into captivity for cognitive testing. The five song measures are repertoire size, mean and minimum vocal deviation (measures of vocal performance), and mean and maximum typicality (measures of song learning). Cognitive performance was measured as the speed with which five cognitive tasks were mastered: a novel foraging task, a color association, a color reversal, a spatial learning problem, and a detour-reaching test. In general linear mixed models controlling for neophobia, none of the song measures predicted any of the cognitive performance measures. Thus, our results do not support the hypothesis that song attributes provide a reliable signal of general cognition in swamp sparrows.
