Abstract
The ability to discriminate the physical states of others could be an adaptive behavior, especially for social animals. For example, the ability to discriminate illness behavior would be helpful for avoiding spoiled foods. We report on an experiment with Japanese quails testing whether these birds can discriminate the physical states of conspecifics. The quails were trained to discriminate between moving video images of quails injected with psychoactive drugs and those in a normal (not injected) condition. Methamphetamine (stimulant) or ketamine (anesthetic) were used to produce drug-induced behaviors in conspecifics. The former induced hyperactive behavior and the latter hypoactive behavior. The subject quails could learn the discrimination and showed generalization to novel images of the drug-induced behaviors. They did not, however, show discriminative behavior according to the type and dosage of the drugs. Thus, they categorized the behavior not on the basis of degree of activity, but on the basis of abnormality.
Notes
We decided to use ketamine and methamphetamine as depressant and stimulant drugs because they are comparatively safer than any other drugs that can induce similar types of behavior. The doses used were the minimum doses at which we could observe some typical drug-induced behaviors. The quails recovered from the injections within less than 2 h and showed no observable aftereffects of the drugs.
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This research was conducted in compliance with The Guidelines for Animal Experimentation (Japanese Association for Laboratory Animal Science, 1987).
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Yamazaki, Y., Shinohara, N. & Watanabe, S. Visual discrimination of normal and drug induced behavior in quails (Coturnix coturnix japonica). Anim Cogn 7, 128–132 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-003-0196-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-003-0196-5