Using repeatability of performance within and across contexts to validate measures of behavioral flexibility

Area of Science:

• Comparative cognition
• Animal behavior

Background:

• Assessing animal cognitive traits relies on behavioral proxies, necessitating validation of task construct validity.
• Ensuring tasks measure target cognitive traits, not others, is crucial for reliable research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the temporal and contextual repeatability of behavioral flexibility tasks in great-tailed grackles.
• To validate that task structures reliably measure the inherent cognitive trait of behavioral flexibility.

Main Methods:

• Temporal repeatability was measured by trials to form color preference across serial reversals in a learning task.
• Contextual repeatability involved comparing performance on reversal learning to solution-switching latency in multi-access boxes.

Main Results:

• Performance in reversal learning was temporally repeatable across multiple reversals.
• Behavioral flexibility measures were contextually repeatable across reversal learning and multi-access box tasks.

Conclusions:

• Task structures for assessing behavioral flexibility demonstrate temporal and contextual repeatability.
• These findings support the use of these tasks for reliably measuring inherent behavioral flexibility in animals.