PS261 Chapter 12: Chapter 12- Study notes.docx
Document Summary
Birds hide seed in caches and then go back to them later to recover them. Recovery: you have to decide weather to look in the presence of a competitor, which food to retrieve first, whether to eat or re-store what you recovered. Food caching and recovery has become a rich source of info about comparative cognition. Researchers cannot accept spatial memory as the onky option: need to rule everything else out. One possibility: birds find caches by searching randomly among possible cache sites. Another possibility is they store food only in a particular types of locations and then go around to these favoured places to recover the food: this is not without remembering that they had put the food there. They may also mark food-storage sites somehow (urine) and then look for these marks when it comes time to recover the food. Or they are able to smell or see the stored food and identify caches in that way.
