Mother's stress slows learning

摘要

Female sticklebacks that are confronted by predators while producing eggs generate offspring with impaired learning abilities. Katie McGhee of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her colleagues used a fake predator to repeatedly chase one set of female threespined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus; pictured), while leaving another set to produce their eggs in peace. Adult offspring from both groups initially showed similar performances in a task in which the animals learned to associate the colour blue with a food reward. But after five days of the task, the offspring of mothers exposed to predators took twice as long to find the food as did the control group.