Selective learning in a marsupial

Associative learning is a change in behaviour mediated by the fomation of associative links between events. While it was once thought that learning was independent of the nature of the stimuli involved, it is now well established that animals associate some events more readily than others. This phenomenon, referred to as "preparedness, has primarily been demonstrated using arbitrary stimuli, such as lights and simple sounds. Very few studies have investigated the ability of animals to learn preferentially about biologically-meaningful stimuli, such s predators, and to our knowledge, no study has tested for the presence of such adaptive biases in a marsupial.