The European starling as a novel model for exploring the effects of early-life adversity on adult cognition and behaviour

School of Science and Technology Seminar

Wednesday 18 February 2015, 15:00, Middlesex University, Hendon Campus, Committee Room 1, Town Hall

Speaker: Melissa Bateson

 

Abstract:

In humans correlations have been described between various types of early-life adversity and adult eating behaviour. In my talk I will describe how we have been using a passerine bird species, the European starling, as a novel experimental model for understanding these links. We have developed short post-hatching manipulations of both food restriction and/or psychosocial stress in starling chicks, and have studied how these manipulations affect subsequent foraging decisions in adult birds. We have found interesting parallels between the effects of early life adversity in starlings and humans including increased impulsivity and decreased selectivity in foraging decisions, implying a “psychology of hunger”. As a subsidiary aim we have been exploring erythrocyte telomere dynamics (birds have nucleated red blood cells) as a biomarker of damage caused by early-life adversity, and have found that both telomere attrition and current telomere length can be good predictors of adult foraging decisions. I discuss whether the adult psychological phenotype that we describe in our birds could be an adaptive, plastic response to the long-term damage caused by adversity in early life.

About:

Melissa Bateson is Professor of Ethology at Newcastle University. She got her undergraduate degree in zoology and biological anthropology, and her doctorate in animal behaviour, both from Oxford University. Following post-docs at Oxford and Duke University, USA, she took up a Royal Society Research Fellowship in the then Psychology Department at Newcastle University, where she has been ever since, currently in the Institute of Neuroscience. Her current research asks how the developmental experience of an animal and its current environment interact to determine individual differences in cognition and emotion.  She is interested in understanding whether early-life adversity produces purely pathological outcomes or whether some phenotypes might represent adaptive responses to experience. She uses the European starling as a model species in which to address these questions, but has also worked on many other species from honeybees to humans.