
Christine SchwabInstitute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education | IGDORE
Christine Schwab
Mag.phil. Dr.rer.nat.
S²C² Science Communication
About
32
Publications
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828
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 2015 - April 2016
February 2012 - March 2015
November 2009 - November 2011
Education
October 2004 - November 2008
October 1995 - March 2004
March 1990 - January 1998
Publications
Publications (32)
Underlying social learning and other important aspects of successful adaptation to social life is social awareness, where individuals are required to pay attention and respond flexibly to others in their environment. We tested the influence of social context (alone, affiliate, non-affiliate, heterospecific) on behavioural interactions (manipulation...
Corvids possess cognitive skills, matching those of non-human primates. However, how these species with their small brains achieve such feats remains elusive. Recent studies suggest that cognitive capabilities could be based on the total numbers of telencephalic neurons. Here we extend this hypothesis further and posit that especially high neuron c...
For most research on birds in the wild, catching and marking of individuals is essential. Corvids may be difficult to catch due to their neophobia and good learning abilities; moreover, different catching methods may target specific social classes. We investigated the success of two different catching methods, Ladder trap and Larsen trap, over the...
Abstract Crows have successfully colonized many cities, and urban zoos have been important in this process. To evaluate why zoos attract crows, we quantified crow numbers and behavior in three zoos in Europe (Debrecen, Edinburgh, Vienna) and one in Asia (Sapporo). Data were collected in 445 surveys over 297 days in summer 2014 and winter 2014–2015....
Social complexity arises from the formation of social relationships like social bonds and dominance hierarchies. In turn, these aspects may be affected by the degree of fission-fusion dynamics, i.e., changes in group size and composition over time. Whilst fission-fusion dynamics has been studied in mammals, birds have received comparably little att...
Urban animals and birds in particular are able to cope with diverse novel threats in a city environment such as avoiding novel, unfamiliar predators. Predator avoidance often includes alarm signals that can be used also by hetero-specifics, which is mainly the case in mixed-species flocks. It can also occur when species do not form flocks but co-oc...
Video S1: Crows' responses to the tonic immobility test.
Figure S1: Sketch of the zoo of Vienna (‘Tiergarten Schönbrunn’).
Figure S2: Division of the zoo into an evenly spaced hexagonal grid (grid sites) used to assess space use of crows.
Figure S3: Maps generated in QGIS, to identify the number of foraging sites (a) and grid sites (b) individual crows were sighted in, respectively.
Table S1: Frequenc...
While personality-dependent dispersal is well studied, local space use has received surprisingly little attention in this context, despite the multiple consequences on survival and fitness. Regarding the coping style of individuals , recent studies on personality-dependent space use within a habitat indicate that 'proactive' individuals are wider r...
Innovation and social information use are influenced by individual characteristics, and are important for the creation and transmission of novel behavioral patterns. Here, we investigated which individual factors predict innovation rates and social transmission of information in a comparative study with identically reared common ravens (Corvus cora...
Animals are predicted to selectively observe and learn from the conspecifics with whom they share social connections. Yet, hardly anything is known about the role of different connections in observation and learning. To address the relationships between social connections, observation, and learning patterns, we investigated information transmission...
Non-breeding common ravens (Corvus corax) live in complex social groups with a high degree of fission–fusion dynamics. They form valuable relationships and alliances with some conspecifics, while taking coordinated action against others. In ravens, affiliates reconcile their conflicts, console each other after conflicts with a third party, and prov...
Consistent individual differences in behaviour, or 'personality', are likely to be influenced by development, social context, and species ecology, though few comparative, longitudinal studies exist. Here, we investigated the role of development and social context on personality variation in two identically reared, social corvids: common ravens and...
Repeatability over time in social context for novel food and object conditions for both species.
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Repeatability over time in individual context (while alone) for novel food and object conditions for both species.
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Repeatability between novel food and object conditions in individual and social context for both species.
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Repeatability over time in individual context: testing whether, in the ravens, subgroup effects arose from social context or similarity in behaviour to kin.
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Constant homophily models testing for in-group preferences of affiliative, i.e. contact sit interactions in a) sibling groups and b) tested subgroups in ravens and crows.
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Exploration is particularly important for young animals , as it enables them to learn to exploit their surroundings. It is likely to be affected by species ecology and social context, though there are few comparative, longitudinal studies that control for effects of early experience. Here, we investigated group level exploration behaviour in two cl...
Most birds rely on cooperation between pair partners for breeding. In long-term monogamous species, pair bonds are considered the basic units of social organization, albeit these birds often form foraging, roosting or breeding groups in which they repeatedly interact with numerous conspecifics. Focusing on jackdaws Corvus monedula, we here investig...
Social foraging provides animals with opportunities to gain knowledge about available food. Studies indicate that animals are influenced by social context during exploration and are able to learn socially. Carrion and hooded crows, which are opportunistic generalists with flexible social systems, have so far received little focus in this area. We c...
Other-regarding preferences are a critical feature of human cooperation but to what extent non-human animals exhibit these preferences is a matter of intense discussion. We tested whether jackdaws show prosocial behaviour (providing benefits to others at no cost to themselves) and altruism (providing benefits to others while incurring costs) with b...
The focus of the present study was a release project on jackdaws (Corvus monedula) which was carried out in two steps in 2007 and 2009. In 2007 we focused on the spatial dispersion of individuals which started gradually but then turned into a stepwise increase. A change in the functional use of space was associated with the birds' spatial dispersio...
Social network analysis (SNA) is a general heading for a collection of statistical tools that aim to describe social interactions and social structure by representing individuals and their interactions as graph objects. It was originally developed for the social sciences, but more recently it was also adopted by behavioral ecologists. However, alth...
It has been suggested that affiliated social relations may facilitate information transfer between individuals. We here tested this rarely examined hypothesis with juvenile and adult jackdaws (Corvus monedula) in three stimulus enhancement tasks, both in a non-food context (experiment 1) and in a food context (experiments 2 and 3). We first show th...
It has been suggested that social dynamics affect social learning but empirical support for this idea is scarce. Here we show that affiliate relationships among kin indeed enhance the performance of common ravens, Corvus corax, in a social learning task. Via daily behavioural protocols we first monitored social dynamics in our group of captive youn...
Complex social behavior builds on the mutual judgment of individuals as cooperation partners and competitors [1]. Play can be used for assessing the others' dispositions in humans and nonhuman mammals [2], whereas little is known about birds. Recently, food-caching corvids have been found to rival primates in their ability to judge the behaviors an...
Sixteen domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) were tested in a familiar context in a series of 1-min trials on how well they obeyed after being told by their owner to lie down. Food was used in 1/3 of all trials, and during the trial the owner engaged in 1 of 5 activities. The dogs behaved differently depending on the owner's attention to them. When bei...
Anhand der kulturellen, sprachlichen und auch rechtlichen Aufarbeitung der Geschichte der Ungarn im Burgenland sollen Prozesse aufgezeigt werden, die zur Konstruktion von Identitäten beitragen: Der Verlust der Selbstverständlichkeit der eigenen Identität, die Verdrängung aus dem öffentlichen Raum und Diskurs, das Fehlen von alternativen Zugehörigke...