Orsola Rosa Salva

Orsola Rosa Salva is a post-doc fellow at the Animal Cognition Lab (ACN Lab). She is interested in the investigation of domestic chicks’ cognitive and perceptual skills. The projects that she is currently involved in employ the domestic chick as a flexible animal model to test the presence of early emerging and experience independent cognitive and perceptual abilities in this species.
The use of this profitable animal model allows to test whether relevant phenomena observed in our species are culture dependent or, on the contrary, might be evolutionary ancient and shared by distant animal species, due to their adaptive value.

Face preferences: using naïve domestic chicks as a model I investigated the presence of innate preferences for face-like schematic and photographic stimuli, controlling for the role of low level perceptual variables, such as spatial frequencies composing the stimulus, contrast polarity and for the role of the “up-down bias” (preference for top heavy configurations).

Social learning: investigation of the role of social learning in pecking responses in the domestic chick, checking for the presence of lateralization effects in this domain.

Gaze processing: Using the domestic chick as a model I investigated brain lateralization and its role in chicks’ responses to the direction of predators’ gaze. The aim of this work was to determine whether chicks would be able to recognize two gaze directions of a dummy human face and whether they did so with one hemisphere preferentially. Both predictions were confirmed by the experimental results.

Publications

Rosa Salva O., Regolin L. e Vallortigara G. (2010). Faces are special for newborn chicks: Evidence for inborn domain-specific mechanisms underlying spontaneous preferences for face-like stimuli. Developmental Science, 13, 565-577.

Rosa Salva O., Daysley J.N., Regolin L. e Vallortigara G. (2010). Time dependent lateralization of social learning in the domestic chick (Gallus gallus domesticus): effects of retention delays in the observed lateralization pattern. Behavioural Brain Research, 212, 152-158.

Rosa Salva O., Daysley J.N., Regolin L. e Vallortigara G. (2009). Lateralization of social learning in the domestic chick (Gallus gallus): learning to avoid. Animal Behaviour, 78, 847-856.