Effects of nutrition on learning Poor nutrition in early life impairs neural development. This leads to lower IQ in humans and flawed song learning in birds. However, recent research indicates that many organisms can offset some of the changes associated with early poor nutrition. Children, for instance, who have had poor nutrition, will undergo a period of accelerated growth once their diet improves. These children will appear normal in their adult life. However, these compensatory measures comes later at a price as other cognitive or developmental disabilities emerging later in life. Research on early poor nutrition, compensatory growth and learning ability in adulthood has been done. The researchers have compared the learning performance of zebra siblings reared on different quality diets after hatching. The food quality and not quantity was changed during the period of research. The rate at which adult birds could learn a simple task, the researchers found, depended on the rate of compensatory growth the birds showed following a period on lower-quality food early in life--not on the diet itself or on the degree of stunted growth.