PSYC 720 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Brain Size, Most Recent Common Ancestor, Woodland Vole
Document Summary
Nodes/branches indicate a common ancestor (info comes from dna, sometimes behavior) Arrow indicates co-existence between monkeys and dinosaurs. 99% of all animals to ever live on earth are now extinct. Horizontal bar indicates time spent on earth (avg. However, we can examine morphological changes, and behavior systems of extant animals. Corvids = jays & crows: food-storing birds. Clark"s nutcrackers hide pine seeds (~90,000 per year hidden, usually find 90% of these: observed spatial cognition and hippocampus size in these corvids. Eat until they"re fill and then they hide the leftovers. Results: nutcrackers do best, pinyon do next as best, scrub jays use their spatial memory less so they performed the worst: hippocampus size was observed (used in memory known from. Food-storage birds have twice as large a hippocampus in relation to their forebrain in comparison to non-food storing birds. Behavior/cognition: caching behavior, ability to recall locations. 1: brain size of areas controlling spatial memory (hippocampus)
