Behavioral flexibility is manipulable and it improves flexibility and innovativeness in a new context

Abstract

Behavioral flexibility, the ability to adapt behavior to new circumstances, is thought to play an important role in a species’ ability to successfully adapt to new environments and expand its geographic range. However, flexibility is rarely directly tested in a way that would allow us to determine how flexibility works to predict a species’ ability to adapt their behavior to new environments. We use great-tailed grackles ( Quiscalus mexicanus ; a bird species) as a model to investigate this question because they have recently rapidly expanded their range into North America. We attempted to manipulate grackle flexibility using shaded (light and dark gray) tube reversal learning to determine whether flexibility