Assessing neophilia and neophobia in pigeons

In various situations, individuals can display different attitudes towards novelty. Sometimes individuals gravitate towards novelty while other times they avoid it. This is referred to as neophilia and neophobia respectively. Understanding these opposing attitudes towards novelty can elucidate various aspects of life, like adaptive behavior, memory, and anxiety, but first there need to be reliable paradigms. Recently, attention has been directed toward establishing such paradigms in birds. We administered two tasks assessing neophilia and neophobia in pigeons to measure both behaviors in the same subjects. For neophilia, subjects were presented with two identical objects then, after a retention interval, one of the objects was replaced with a novel object. A discrimination ratio was calculated based on which object they were closer to (proximity) and where they looked, with 0 indicating no preference. Neither proximity nor looking behavior were significantly different from 0. For neophobia, a novel object was placed near a familiar food dish. We measured the latency to approach or touch the food when an object was present or absent and repeated this procedure 3 times. There were no main effects of trial or object and no interaction. Pigeons were neither attracted to nor afraid of novel objects. Even without overt neophilia or neophobia, a neural response to novelty in these subjects is probable. They were divided into two groups where one group saw novel objects while the other saw familiar ones. Then they were stained for ZENK and we are investigating if there were differential rates of expression.