Chapter category: Development

Dealing with Objects in Space: Lateralized Mechanisms of Perception and Cognition in the Domestic Chick (Gallus gallus)

This chapter appears in the following book:

Behavioural and Morphological Asymmetries
in Vertebrates

Edited by: Yegor B. Malashichev and A. Wallace Deckel
ISBN: 1-58706-105-8
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Chapter authors:
Lucia Regolin

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The domestic chick constitutes an excellent animal model for the investigation of the lateralization of brain functions possibly underlying a variety of perceptual and cognitive abilities. In particular, lateralised information processing is considered to take place in perception of partly occluded objects, i.e., in the so called process of amodal completion, and for the knowledge about the existence and the position of objects no longer available to direct perception, particularly when such a knowledge is probed in working memory (delayed response task). Available data indicate that in the domestic chick, the right hemisphere/left eye is in charge of processing amodal completion, moreover, when engaged in a working memory task, chicks showed right-hemispheric dominance for locating a target on the base of position-specific cues and bilateral participation of both hemispheres for locating a target on the base of object specific cues. Interestingly, the results of the experiments with the delayed response task showed that chicks did not exhibit any asymmetry in working memory when position- and object-specific cues were available either separately or together. An asymmetry only appeared when object-specific and position-specific cues were present simultaneously but provided contradictory information, in which case the left-eyed chicks clearly chose the spatial cue, ignoring the object characteristics, whereas the right-eyed chicks chose similarly both the spatial and object cues.

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Chapter category: Development

Dealing with Objects in Space: Lateralized Mechanisms of Perception and Cognition in the Domestic Chick (Gallus gallus)

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