Food-caching mountain chickadees can learn abstract rules to solve a complex spatial-temporal pattern.

The use of abstract rules in behavioral decisions is considered evidence of executive functions associated with higher-level cognition. Laboratory studies across taxa have shown that animals may be capable of learning abstract concepts, such as the relationships between items, but often use simpler cognitive abilities to solve tasks. Little is known about whether or how animals learn and use abstract rules in natural environments. Here, we tested whether wild, food-caching mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli) could learn an abstract rule in a spatial-temporal task in which the location of a food reward rotated daily around an 8-feeder square spatial array for up to 34 days. Chickadees initially searched for the daily food reward by visiting the most recently rewarding locations and then moving backward to visit previously rewarding feeders, using memory of previous locations. But by the end of the task, chickadees were more likely to search forward in the correct direction of rotation, moving away from the previously rewarding feeders. These results suggest that chickadees learned the direction rule for daily feeder rotation and used this to guide their decisions while searching for a food reward. Thus, chickadees appear to use an executive function to make decisions on a foraging-based task in the wild. [Display omitted] • Abstract rules are based on relations between items, not physical features • Chickadees learned an abstract rule and used it to search for food more efficiently • Chickadees did not learn the timing of a spatial-temporal task with daily changes • Spatial tasks provide unique advantages to studying rule-learning Learning abstract concepts was once considered uniquely human but has recently been shown in nonhuman animal species under laboratory conditions. Benedict et al. show that wild, food-caching mountain chickadees learned an abstract rule from experience with a foraging task set in natural conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]