Jean-Nicolas Audet

Jean-Nicolas Audet
The Rockefeller University | Rockefeller · Center for Field Research in Ethology and Ecology

Ph. D.
www.jnaudet.com

About

33
Publications
132,797
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,218
Citations
Introduction
I'm interested in mechanisms responsible for variation in animal cognitive abilities, and more specifically innovation. Among others, I'm investigating neural and ecological correlates of innovative problem-solving in birds.
Additional affiliations
June 2017 - present
The Rockefeller University
Position
  • PostDoc Position
September 2013 - December 2014
McGill University
Position
  • Research Assistant
July 2003 - January 2012
Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Québec (CHUQ)
Position
  • Research Assistant
Education
September 2011 - June 2017
McGill University
Field of study
  • Neurobiology
May 2009 - August 2011
Université Laval
Field of study
  • Neurobiology
January 2004 - May 2009
Université Laval
Field of study
  • Biology

Publications

Publications (33)
Article
Full-text available
Behavioral ecologists interested in comparative cognition have struggled to design tasks that are both ecologically relevant and experimentally rigorous. In experimental psychology, standardized tests of reversal learning, set-shifting and self-control have long been used to measure aspects of flexible behavior especially with regards to determinin...
Article
Full-text available
Adaptation to urban habitats presumably requires changes in cognitive, behavioral, and physiological traits enabling individuals to exploit new resources. It is predicted that boldness, reduced neophobia, and enhanced problem-solving and learning skills might characterize urban birds compared with their rural conspecifics, while exposure to novel p...
Article
Full-text available
Songbirds represent an important model organism for elucidating molecular mechanisms that link genes with complex behaviors, in part because they have discrete vocal learning circuits that have parallels with those that mediate human speech. We found that ~10% of the genes in the avian genome were regulated by singing, and we found a striking regio...
Article
Full-text available
Behavioural innovations can provide key advantages for animals in the wild, especially when ecological conditions change rapidly and unexpectedly. Innovation rates can be compared across taxa by compiling field reports of novel behaviours. Large-scale analyses have shown that innovativeness reduces extinction risk, increases colonization success an...
Article
Complex vocal learning, a critical component of human spoken language, has been assumed to be associated with more-advanced cognitive abilities. Tests of this hypothesis between individuals within a species have been inconclusive and have not been done across species. In this work, we measured an array of cognitive skills—namely, problem-solving, a...
Article
Full-text available
David Sherry's pioneering work on the neuroecology of spatial memory has three characteristics that could inspire studies on other cognitive processes: it was grounded in a robust prior literature in psychology and neuroscience; it identified several natural history contexts in which repeated independent evolution of spatial memory differences had...
Preprint
Full-text available
Single amino acid variants (SAVs) may provide clues to understanding evolution of traits. A complex trait that has evolved convergently among species is vocal learning, the rare ability to imitate sounds heard and an important component of spoken-language. Here we assessed whether convergent vocal learning bird species have convergent SAVs (CSAVs)...
Article
Full-text available
Synopsis In the wild, particularly in rapidly changing conditions, being capable of solving new problems can increase an animal’s chances of survival and reproduction. In the current context of widespread habitat destruction and increasing urbanization, innovativeness might be a crucial trait. In the past few decades, birds have proven to be a mode...
Article
Full-text available
Parasites can have important detrimental effects on host fitness, thereby influencing their ecology and evolution. Hosts can, in turn, exert strong selective pressures on their parasites, affecting eco-evolutionary dynamics. Although the reciprocal pressures that hosts and parasites exert on each other have long been recognized, the mechanisms are...
Article
Full-text available
Performance on different cognitive tasks varies between individuals within species. Recent evidence suggests that, in some species, this variation reflects the existence of coherent cognitive strategies bringing together positive and negative relationships between tasks. For example, Carib grackles show a speed–accuracy trade-off, where individuals...
Article
Full-text available
Problem solving and innovation are key components of intelligence. We compare wild-caught individuals from two species that are close relatives of Darwin’s finches, the innovative Loxigilla barbadensis, and its most closely related species in Barbados, the conservative Tiaris bicolor. We found an all-or-none difference in the problem-solving capaci...
Article
Full-text available
Reference-quality genomes are expected to provide a resource for studying gene structure, function, and evolution. However, often genes of interest are not completely or accurately assembled, leading to unknown errors in analyses or additional cloning efforts for the correct sequences. A promising solution is long-read sequencing. Here we tested Pa...
Article
Full-text available
The effects of urbanization on avian cognition remain poorly understood. Risk-taking behaviors like boldness, neophobia and flight distance are thought to affect opportunism and innovativeness, and should also vary with urbanization. Here, we investigate variation in risk-taking behaviors in the field in an avian assemblage of nine species that for...
Article
Full-text available
Recent genetic studies yielded conflicting results regarding a role for the variant chromogranin B (CHGB)P413L allele as a disease modifier in ALS. Moreover, potential deleterious effects of the CHGBP413L variant in ALS pathology have not been investigated. Here we report that in transfected cultured cells, the variant CHGBL413 protein exhibited ab...
Article
Full-text available
String-pulling is one of the most popular tests in animal cognition because of its apparent complexity, and of its potential to be applied to very different taxa. In birds, the basic procedure involves a food reward, suspended from a perch by a string, which can be reached by a series of coordinated pulling actions with the beak and holding actions...
Data
Linear regressions between string pulling performance and all other measured behavioral traits. String-pulling latency vs A-B: Shyness and neophobia, C-D: Problem-solving, E-F: Discrimination and reversal learning. Linear regressions with all animals including non-solvers on the string pulling task (which were attributed the maximum latency +1: 300...
Data
String-pulling success progression in Barbados bullfinches. Average number of trials needed for Barbados bullfinches to reach every major step of the string pulling task. Bars represent means ±SEM. (PDF)
Data
Carib grackle performing string-pulling. (MP4)
Data
Barbados bullfinch performing string-pulling. (MP4)
Article
Full-text available
Several studies on cognition, molecular phylogenetics and taxonomic diversity independently suggest that Darwin’s finches are part of a larger clade of speciose, flexible birds, the family Thraupidae, a member of the New World nine-primaried oscine superfamily Emberizoidea. Here, we first present a new, previously unpublished, dataset of feeding in...
Article
Full-text available
Only a few distantly related mammals and birds have the trait of complex vocal learning, which is the ability to imitate novel sounds. This ability is critical for speech acquisition and production in humans, and is attributed to specialized forebrain vocal control circuits that have several unique connections relative to adjacent brain circuits. A...
Article
Full-text available
The generation and maintenance of within-population variation in cognitive abilities remain poorly understood. Recent theories propose that this variation might reflect the existence of consistent cognitive strategies distributed along a slow-fast continuum influenced by shyness. The slow-fast continuum might be reflected in the well-known speed-ac...
Article
Full-text available
The bullfinch Loxigilla barbadensis is an endemic passerine on the Caribbean island of Barbados that has only recently been taxonomically split from the Lesser Antillean bullfinch L. noctis. The trait that most clearly distinguishes L. barbadensis from L. noctis is the absence in the male of sexually dimorphic coloration of the body and throat feat...
Article
Full-text available
Behavioural innovations have been largely documented in birds and are thought to provide advantages in changing environments. However, the mechanisms by which behavioural innovations spread remain poorly known. Two major mechanisms are supposed to play a fundamental role: innovation diffusion by social learning and independent appearance of the sam...
Article
Full-text available
Tar DNA binding protein 43 (TDP-43) mislocalization and aggregation is a hallmark of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal lobar dementia. Moreover, TDP-43 mRNA was found to be upregulated by ∼2.5-fold in the spinal cord of sporadic ALS subjects. Here we have examined the effects of nerve injury in new transgenic mouse models overe...
Article
Full-text available
Proliferation of glia and immune cells is a common pathological feature of many neurodegenerative diseases including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Here, to investigate the role of proliferating cells in motor neuron disease, SOD1(G93A) transgenic mice were treated intracerebroventicularly (i.c.v.) with the anti-mitotic drug cytosine arabinos...
Article
Approximately 20% cases of familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are caused by mutations in the gene encoding Cu/Zn superoxide dismutase (SOD1). Recent studies have shown that methylene blue (MB) was efficient in conferring protection in several neurological disorders. MB was found to improve mitochondrial function, to reduce reactive oxygen...
Article
Approximately 10% of the cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are inherited, with the majority of identified linkages in the gene encoding Cu/Zn superoxide dismutase (SOD1). Recent studies showed that human wild-type SOD1 (SOD1(WT)) overexpression accelerated disease in mice expressing human SOD1 mutants linked to ALS. However, there is a c...
Article
Macrophage colony stimulating factor (M-CSF) is a cytokine that regulates the survival, proliferation and maturation of microglial cells. Administration of M-CSF can promote neuronal survival in various models of central nervous system (CNS) injury. Here, in an attempt to induce a neuroprotective microglial cell phenotype and enhance motor neuron s...
Article
Full-text available
Microglial activation is a hallmark of all neurodegenerative diseases including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Here, a detailed characterization of the microglial cell population within the spinal cord of a mouse model of familial ALS was performed. Using flow cytometry, we detected three distinct microglial populations within the spinal cord...

Questions

Questions (3)

Network

Cited By