California's Central Valley: Teaching Social Determinants of Health and Cultural Humility Through an Interprofessional, Overnight Road Trip.

This study explored the value of an overnight interprofessional road trip of students, faculty, staff, and community members through the Central Valley of California. The goal of the mobile classroom was to teach complex topics such as cultural humility, health disparities, population health, implicit bias, interprofessionalism, community engagement, and social determinants of health. Participants identified educational outcomes valuable to them and assessed how closely the experience aligned with their university's strategic goals. Pre/post-surveys consisted of Likert scale and open-ended questions over five trips (N=186). Qualitative and quantitative analyses reflected an informational and transformational experience, especially through the sharing of personal stories and connections among participants and community hosts. Participants rated the experience as strongly aligned with the university's strategic goals. This field-trip pedagogy positioned a professionally diverse group to learn together about the contributions, socio-historical complexities, and health challenges of a region where their students and patients live.

Size is relative: use of relational concepts by wild hummingbirds.

Rufous hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus) will readily learn the location and the colour of rewarded flowers within their territory. But if these birds could apply a relational concept such as 'the larger flowers have more nectar', they could forego learning the locations of hundreds of individual flowers. Here, we investigated whether wild male territorial rufous hummingbirds might use 'larger than' and 'smaller than' relational rules and apply them to flowers of different sizes. Subjects were trained to feed consistently from one of two flowers. Although the flowers differed only in size, the reward was always contained in the same-size flower. The birds were then tested on a choice of two empty flowers: one of the familiar size and the other a novel size. Hummingbirds applied relational rules by choosing the flower that was of the correct relational size rather than visiting the flower of the size rewarded during training. The choices made by the hummingbirds were not consistent with alternative mechanisms such as peak shift or associative learning. We suggest that while hummingbirds are very good at remembering the spatial locations of rewarding flowers, they would be able to use relative rules when foraging in new and changing environments.

Estimating on the fly: The approximate number system in rufous hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus).

When presented with resources that differ in quantity, many animals use a numerosity system to discriminate between them. One taxonomically widespread system is the approximate number system. This is a numerosity system that allows the rapid evaluation of the number of objects in a group and which is regulated by Weber's Law. Here we investigated whether wild, free-living rufous hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus) possess an approximate number system. The hummingbirds were presented with two experiments. In the first we investigated whether hummingbirds spontaneously chose an array containing more flowers than an alternate array. In the second we asked whether the hummingbirds could learn to use numerosity as a cue to which of two arrays contained the better reward. The birds did not spontaneously prefer an array containing more flowers. After minimal training, however, they learned to choose the more numerous array and could differentiate between arrays of five and seven flowers. These data support the presence of an approximate number system in the rufous hummingbird. It seems plausible that having such a system would enable much more efficient foraging in this species.