Learning to learn: Advanced behavioural flexibility in a poison frog

Behavioural flexibility is essential for survival in a world with changing contingencies and its evolution is linked to complex physical and social environments. Serial reversal learning, in which reward contingencies change frequently, is a key indicator of behavioural flexibility. While many vertebrates are capable of serial reversal learning, only birds and mammals have previously been shown to use rule-based decision strategies (e.g. win-stay/lose-shift) to become better at learning changes in reward contingencies across reversals. While the lifestyles of many amphibians have a degree of complexity, the evidence to date suggests limited levels of behavioural flexibility. Here, we show that the poison frog Dendrobates auratus , which has evolved complex parental behaviours that likely depend on remembering locations in a flexible manner, can use a win-stay/lose-shift strategy to increase their behavioural flexibility across sequential changes in the reward contingencies in a visual discrimination task. Furthermore, probe trials demonstrate that the frogs used the provided visual cues to spatially orient in the maze in a manner reminiscent of complex spatial cognition. Our study provides the first evidence of serial reversal learning in frogs and is the first to demonstrate the use of a rule-based learning strategy in a nonavian, nonmammalian species.