Published January 7, 2022 | Version v1
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Flexible use of memory by food-caching birds

  • 1. Columbia University

Description

Animals use memory-guided and memory-independent strategies to make navigational decisions. Disentangling the contribution of these strategies to navigation is critical for understanding how memory influences behavioral output. To address this issue, we studied spatial behaviors of the chickadee, a food-caching bird. Chickadees hide food in concealed, scattered locations and retrieve their caches later in time. We designed an apparatus that allows birds to cache and retrieve food at many sites while navigating in a laboratory arena. This apparatus enabled automated tracking of behavioral variables – including caches, retrievals, and investigations of different sites. We built probabilistic models to fit these behavioral data using a combination of mnemonic and non-mnemonic factors. We found that chickadees use some navigational strategies that are independent of cache memories, including opportunistic foraging and spatial biases. They combine these strategies with spatially precise memories of which sites contain caches and which sites they have previously checked. A single memory of site contents is used in a context-dependent manner: during caching chickadees avoid sites ­that contain food, while during retrieval they instead preferentially access occupied sites. Our approach is a powerful way to investigate navigational decisions in a natural behavior, including flexible contributions of memory to these decisions.

Notes

Funding provided by: National Science Foundation
Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001
Award Number: Graduate Research Fellowship Program

Funding provided by: Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation
Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000997
Award Number: Young Investigator Award

Funding provided by: National Institutes of Health
Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100003194
Award Number: DP2 AG071918-01 New Innovator Award

Funding provided by: New York Stem Cell Foundation
Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100003194
Award Number: Robertson Neuroscience Investigator Award

Funding provided by: National Institutes of Health
Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000002
Award Number: T32 EY013933

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Related works

Is derived from
10.5281/zenodo.5806648 (DOI)