Only the parental generation (those that had been stressed directly) displayed a convincing effect of the stress treatment.  Over the course of four sessions, control birds, but not stressed birds, increased the number of mealworms found and consumed.   The change in cups completed (mealworms eaten) in control birds was confirmed by a P-value of 0.018 with a Friedman test.   No difference between stressed and control birds for the number of cups visited suggests that the effect seen is not simply a product of increased exploration.

    No significant differences between the offspring of stressed and control birds for any of the factors measures, makes drawing conclusions regarding the heritability of social isolation stress effects on spatial learning impossible at this time.   It is a decent possibility that the failure to detect any differences, if they occurred, was due to the adequacy of the second spatial test.   Preliminary results from a test of associative learning in these chickens indicate that heritable effects may have affected behaviours other than spatial learning.