Urban noise does not affect cognitive performance in wild Australian magpies
2022
Connelly, Farley | Hall, Michelle L. | Johnsson, Robin D. | Elliot-Kerr, Shona | Dow, Belinda R. | Lesku, John A. | Mulder, Raoul A.
City-living animals are exposed to pervasive human-generated noise from traffic and industry. There is growing evidence that this exposure may have deleterious physiological and behavioural effects. Cognitive processes could be particularly sensitive to the disruptive effects of noise, but little is known about the potential effects of noise on cognition and cognitive development. We compared the cognitive performance of wild, urban-dwelling Australian magpies, Cracticus tibicen tyrannica, in resident groups exposed to differing levels of environmental noise. We found no evidence that cognitive performance (measured across four behavioural tests estimating different aspects of cognitive ability) covaried with the amplitude of ambient anthropogenic noise across an urban gradient of noise levels. With the exception of one task (spatial memory), the cognitive development of adolescent magpies measured at two different developmental stages (on average 160 and 290 days postfledging) was also similar, irrespective of whether they had been exposed to relatively high or low levels of anthropogenic noise. Our results suggest that levels of anthropogenic noise typical of city parklands do not appear to negatively impact general cognitive performance.
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