Background
Used by most organisms to navigate their environment.
What is spatial cognition?
The authors used this technology in "smart" feeder arrays to assess spatial cognitive ability.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)
The authors found that this weather-related dependent variable is a strong indicator of selective pressure.
What is mean snow depth?
Mountain chickadees live in this region.
What is the northern Sierra Nevada?
These birds from the study experience harsher winter conditions, where reliance on their food caches is greater.
What are mountain chickadees?
These mountain chickadees are classified in this group if they had the lowest performance on cognitive tasks and survived for less than one year.
What is the "worst" group?
The authors found a significant difference in this dependent variable between the best and worst performing birds.
What is mean number of errors?
In the study, this number of chickadees were sampled across three years of testing.
What is 42?
Differences in spatial cognition have been
associated with differential gene expression in this region of the brain.
What is the hippocampus?
These methods of whole genome sequencing were combined to compare bird genomes.
What is GWAS?
OR
What is Random Forest machine-learning approach?
The authors concluded that the cognitive phenotype has a moderate level of heritability because half of the top SNPs analyzed had a strength of association greater than this percentage.
What is 50%?
This gene (which has been highlighted before in one of the paper presentations!) is known for its involvement in axon guidance, brain development, progenitor cell proliferation, and migration.
What is ROBO1?
Birds in this type of environment tend to outperform those inhabiting milder environments on spatial cognitive tasks and exhibit significant differences in hippocampus morphology, including increased neuron number, soma size, and hippocampal neurogenesis rates.
What is higher elevation and/or latitude?
The authors looked at this dependent variable to assess spatial cognitive ability: the number of
unrewarding feeders visited prior to visiting the correct
rewarding feeder.
What is mean number of errors?
This model accounts for linkage between loci and relatedness among individuals, and suggests that spatial cognitive phenotype appears to be heritable.
What is the Bayesian sparse linear mixed model?
This is the scientific name of the mountain chickadee.
What is P. gambeli?
These types of traits do not appear to change with age and experience (ex: spatial cognitive ability).
What is a temporally stable trait?
This type of sequencing approach considers combinations of multiple loci that may influence a single phenotype.
What is machine-learning approach (ex: Random Forest)?
Because carriers of this "worst" allele might experience behavioral or physiological disadvantages and rarely survive to adulthood, there was a distinct lack of their representation in the study sample.
What are H2 homozygotes?
The birds were fitted with plastic leg bands embedded with these, which allowed for unique identification of each bird.
What are passive integrative transponder (PIT) tags?