Bruiser participated in my first North Island robin cognition study in 2014 and is no stranger to cognitive tests. In my latest research, carried out in 2015 and recently published in Behavioural Processes, Bruiser quickly mastered opening swivel lids to grab a snack. By contrast, those robins that had never been tested were slow to catch on.

If prior experience affects performance in a cognitive task, how can we fairly compare naïve and experienced birds? Designing tests that can give us unbiased, accurate measures of cognitive ability in the wild gets even more complicated when we start to consider other factors, such as hunger or boldness.

As it turns out,  I also found that hungry robins performed worse than their well-fed counterparts in a test of inhibitory control. These birds were more likely to keep pecking at food through a transparent barrier, rather than reaching around the barrier to retrieve it.

Lid-opening and ‘detour-reaching’ tasks are commonly used cognitive tests for birds. However, the robins’ performance reveals some pitfalls in relying on these tasks to measure individual cognitive ability. It hardly seems fair to compare a spoilt little Bruiser with a hungry bird who has never been to robin school…