In order to continue with data collection, I need to support the Organization for Bat Conservation (Bloomfield Hills, MI) for the time that their staff dedicates to this project. Staff at the OBC spend time helping set up the research, moving the animals to research areas, and occasionally assisting with data collection. Currently, I spend 7 hours a week testing skunks. At this rate, I have about 3 more months of data collection left, which ends up being at least 84 hours of staff time.

The OBC is a non-profit and supports many rescued and rehabilitated animals and depend upon donor support to fulfill the mission of educating people about conservation, so compensating them for their limited time is extremely important.

This project was previously funded by a $1500 award from Oakland University, the Provost's Grant, which covered staff fees up to January 2016.

Additional Information

Current Results (see methods first):

One skunk (Raspberry) started with the arbitrary tasks and is now completing the real tasks.

Two skunks (Seymour and Sebastian) started with the real tasks and are now completing the arbitrary tasks.

Raspberry passed criterion for learning to touch a painted line with food on it over an unbaited painted line (condition A and then condition B, methods section) and then I tested her with the other conditions. She appeared to be using a visual rule about contact between the food and painted line, and she avoided broken lines. Raspberry transferred her knowledge to the real slats (passing criterion immediately on conditions A and B) and I am now testing her to see if she is using the same rules as with the arbitrary tasks.

Seymour and Sebastian failed to learn to pull a supportive slat (slat supporting a food item) over an unsupportive slat. After going through the testing conditions (with no improvement), I am now testing them to see if they can learn the arbitrary task.

The reason why I cannot tell if skunks can understand support is because the only skunk who has learned the task with real slats received the arbitrary tasks first, in which she could ONLY use visual cues. She may therefore have transferred the use of these visual cues to the real task, even if she was capable of using or learning about the physical rules.

But, there is still the question of why one skunk learned any of the tasks, and two have not yet learned the tasks, and there are actually two possible answers for that question:

1) Raspberry is smarter than Seymour and Sebastian, and all the skunks would have shown the same pattern regardless of which scenarios (real or arbitrary) they completed first.

2) There is an order effect (remember, Raspberry received arbitrary first, then real, while Seymour and Sebastian received real first, now arbitrary), where learning the arbitrary tasks first makes it easier to learn the real tasks. Maybe the action of actually pulling a slat is complicated enough that it uses up a skunk's cognitive resources, making them not have cognitive resources to spare on 1) paying attention to the location of the food and 2) inhibiting pulling a slat immediately. Learning the arbitrary task first allowed Raspberry to learn the visual patterns before being asked to make a complex motor response (pulling a slat versus just touching a painted line). This could have lightened the difficulty of the real slat task when she received it later.

These explanations have created different predictions for how the skunks will perform with continued testing:

1) Seymour and Sebastian will also fail to learn the arbitrary task, and giving them the real task again will show no improvement.

2). Seymour and Sebastian will learn the arbitrary task, and giving them the real task again will show much improved performance.