Do Continuous and Intermittent Traffic Noise Have Similar Negative Impacts on Zebra Finch Cognitive Performance?

ABSTRACT Anthropogenic noise pollution levels are increasing in natural communities with numerous impacts on the behavior of animals, including recent studies demonstrating that noise negatively affects cognitive performance in birds. However, there are also examples of avian species inhabiting or even thriving in urbanized habitats, suggesting that animals might overcome the challenges posed by anthropogenic noise, perhaps by habituating with repeated exposure. We examined whether zebra finches habituate to road noise when presented with continuous playback of road traffic noise versus intermittent noise playback as they learned novel foraging tasks. We hypothesized that birds exposed to continuous traffic noise during and between repeated trials would demonstrate higher cognitive performance than birds with intermittent exposure. We used a battery of foraging tasks that measured different aspects of cognition, including inhibitory control, motor learning, color association, and spatial memory. We found that birds presented with continuous noise exposure had higher performance scores in the motor learning and spatial memory tasks, but we did not observe differences between treatments for inhibitory control or color association tasks. These results suggest that birds were unable to broadly habituate to the traffic playback. Instead, habituation or reduced distraction could occur only in some cognitive domains; certain cognitive activities or modules could be more sensitive to noise‐induced cognitive impairment than others, or other intrinsic factors might determine an animal's response to distracting stimuli.