Successive negative contrast in a bird: starlings’ behaviour after unpredictable negative changes in food quality

In a successive negative contrast (SNC) procedure, subjects used to a familiar contingency are unexpectedly shifted to a less favourable one. Typically, mammals in the new condition show lower anticipatory and consummatory responses than controls that only experience the low contingency, but similar experiments in birds have failed to show SNC. We investigated SNC in […]