Week 4 – 31 July 2016:

Yawn

Yawning is an incredible behaviour. We all do it, but no one can say definitively why we do it. Yawning generally happens more frequently when we are tired or bored, but that doesn’t say much about its function. Some researchers have suggested that yawning is a way of cooling the brain, or that it arouses the brain’s cerebral cortex. Whatever the function, it must be pretty important because lots of animals do it, from jewel fish to walruses.

Are you yawning yet? If so, then you are engaged in contagious yawning, the result of seeing others yawn, or even thinking about yawning. Contagious yawning is a far less common behaviour, and had been demonstrated convincingly for just a handful of mammal species.

Recently Andre Gallup and colleagues in the Psychology Department at the State University of New York in Oneonta investigated contagious yawning in a group of captive budgerigars. Given that budgies form long-term pair bonds, and live in coordinated flocks year-round, they seemed like a good test subject. So… can budgies cause each other to yawn?

Gallup et al. observed paired birds in adjacent cages. In some cases, members of the pair could see each other, and in other cases they were visually isolated by an opaque barrier. After 32 hours of observation, and 131 recorded yawns, it was found that a budgie was more likely to yawn if it had seen its companion do the same. It didn’t seem to matter whether the subject was familiar with the bird in the next cage, or if it was a stranger. Budgies were then shown video footage of 150 yawns. This resulted in a modest by significant increased the frequency of yawning.

A link has been suggested between contagious yawning and the ability to empathize with plight of others. If you are a contagious yawner, it may be that you are a more empathetic person. Gallup et al. suggested that budgerigars might serve as a good model for the study of empathy.

When contacted, Andrew explained that his group was continuing their studies of budgie social behaviour, and was interested in a neurochemical basis for their their contagious yawning.

I asked whether bird yawning caused yawns among members of the Bird Yawning Lab. He said: “I did find myself yawning quite frequently when I first began to study yawning, but over the years I have become habituated to yawning stimuli (at least when it comes to research).”

Gallup, A. C. et al. 2015. Experimental evidence of contagious yawning in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus). Anim. Cogn. 18:1051-1058.

Photo credits: budgies – Talkbudgies.com; Australian Post budgerigar stamp – stampboards.com