Wild narrow-striped mongooses use social information to enhance behavioural flexibility

Abstract

Behavioural flexibility allows animals to adapt their behaviour to changing situations in their current habitat. Flexibility is involved in behaviours comprising decision-making in their ecological or social environment. However, the ability to behave flexibly can co-vary with an individual's personality and its level of inhibitory control, so that previous work has not discerned any consistent pattern in the direction of the relationship among these traits. Our aim was, therefore, to examine the influence of neophobia, inhibitory control, and social learning on behavioural flexibility performance in wild narrow-striped mongooses (Mungotictis decemlineata) in Kirindy Forest, Madagascar. To this end, we conducted novel object tests to assess neophobia, a cylinder task to assess inhibitory control, and a discrimination and reversal learning task to quantify behavioural flexibility in a natural group setting. We found that neophobia did not correlate with learning performance either in the discrimination learning task or in the reversal learning task. Further, individuals exhibiting more inhibitory control learned faster during the initial learning task, but not in the reversed task, suggesting that inhibitory control facilitated individuals' learning abilities but not behavioural flexibility. Finally, opportunities for social learning correlated with individuals' performance during the reversal learning task. Thus, in narrow-striped mongooses, social learning seems to facilitate behavioural flexibility, in addition to individual learning, in cognitively more challenging situations, such as a reversal learning condition.