INVESTIGATING THE BEHAVIOURAL AND NEURAL MECHANISMS OF AUDITORY CATEGORISATION IN JACKDAWS (<EM>CORVUS MONEDULA</EM>)

Animals encounter a constant stream of information from their environment across different sensory modalities. To interpret and respond appropriately, they must be able to group stimuli into meaningful classes. Categorisation, therefore, is a key cognitive process underlying perception, communication and decision-making. While extensive research has examined the behavioural and neural basis of visual categorisation, far less is known about how animals form categories in the purely auditory domain, with studies so far largely focused on ecologically relevant categories such as call types. The current study addresses this gap by investigating whether jackdaws, known for their advanced cognitive abilities, can categorise auditory stimuli along a continuous acoustic dimension, specifically frequency, using arbitrary category boundaries that shift across sessions. Jackdaws are tested on their ability to generalise learned frequency-based categories to novel sound classes by attending to the defining frequency feature and ignoring irrelevant acoustic variation. In addition to behavioural data, electrophysiological recordings will be done in the NCL, the avian analogue to the mammalian prefrontal cortex. Previous research in the visual domain has shown that NCL neurons exhibit categorical responses, firing preferentially for one of two categories. While other studies have investigated visual and cross-modal coding in the NCL, its role in pure auditory categorisation remains unexplored. Our results will offer a better understanding of how the NCL contributes to auditory categorisation and enable comparisons with its role in visual categorisation, providing insight into whether similar neural mechanisms underlie categorisation in both sensory modalities.