Flexibility training does not increase behavioral flexibility of Florida scrub-jays

Kelsey McCune, Sahas Barve

Human modifications of environments are expanding, causing global changes that other species must adjust to or suffer from. Behavioral flexibility (hereafter 'flexibility') could be key to coping with rapid change. Behavioral research can contribute to conservation by determining which behaviors can predict the ability to adjust to human modified environments and whether these can be manipulated. When research that manipulates behavior in a conservation context occurs, it primarily trains a specific behavior to address one potential threat improve individual success in the wild. However, training a domain general cognitive ability, such as flexibility, has the potential to change a whole suite of behaviors, which could have a larger impact on influencing success in adjusting to human modified environments. This project asks whether flexibility can be increased by experimentally increasing environmental heterogeneity and whether such an increase can help species succeed in human modified environments. We explore whether it is possible to take insights from highly divergent species and apply them to address critical conservation challenges. This pushes the limits in terms of understanding how conserved these abilities may be and to what extent they can be shaped by the environment. We aim to 1) conduct flexibility interventions in flexible species that are successful in human modified environments (California scrub-jays or blue jays) to understand how flexibility relates to success; and 2) implement these interventions in a vulnerable species (Florida scrub-jays) to determine whether flexibility as a generalizable cognitive ability can be trained and whether such training improves success in human-modified environments. This research will significantly advance our understanding of the causes and consequences of flexibility, linking behavior to environmental change, cognition, and success in human modified environments through a comparative framework.