Social stimuli influencing feeding behaviour of Burmese fowl: video analysis

Abstract. After adolescent Burmese red junglefowl, Gallus gallus spadecius, were exposed to videotapes of conspecifics feeding from visually distinctive food dishes, the viewers exhibited enhanced preferences for food dishes of the type that they had observed conspecifics exploit. Both auditory and visual stimuli associated with feeding fowl played a role in producing these socially enhanced feeding-site preferences, and videotapes of fowl actually feeding from a food dish were more effective in enhancing preference for that type of food dish than were videotapes of fowl either active or immobile near a food dish. Thus, juvenile junglefowl not only responded to video images of conspecifics and generalized from video images of objects to the objects themselves, they also responded differentially to video images of general activity near a food dish and feeding behaviour directed towards a food dish. Whether exposure to a videotape sufficed to influence feeding behaviour during testing depended on: (1) the duration of the subjects' exposure to videotapes, (2) the duration of the delay between videotape viewing and preference testing and (3) the criteria used to detect social influence on feeding behaviour.