Using ecology to guide the study of cognitive and neural mechanisms of different aspects of spatial memory in food-hoarding animals

Understanding the survival value of behaviour does not tell us how the mechanisms that control this behaviour work. Nevertheless, understanding survival value can guide the study of these mechanisms. In this paper, we apply this principle to understanding the cognitive mechanisms that support cache retrieval in scatter-hoarding animals. We believe it is too simplistic to predict that all scatter-hoarding animals will outperform non-hoarding animals on all tests of spatial memory. Instead, we argue that we should look at the detailed ecology and natural history of each species. This understanding of natural history then allows us to make predictions about which aspects of spatial memory should be better in which species. We use the natural hoarding behaviour of the three best-studied groups of scatter-hoarding animals to make predictions about three aspects of their spatial memory: duration, capacity and spatial resolution, and we test these predictions against the existing literature. Having laid out how ecology and natural history can be used to predict detailed cognitive abilities, we then suggest using this approach to guide the study of the neural basis of these abilities. We believe that this complementary approach will reveal aspects of memory processing that would otherwise be difficult to discover.

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Event Memory Uniquely Predicts Memory for Large-Scale Space

10.31234/osf.io/agdkx ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Jesse Q. Sargent ◽

Jeffrey M. Zacks ◽

David Z. Hambrick ◽

Nan Lin

Keyword(s):

Episodic Memory ◽

Spatial Memory ◽

Cognitive Abilities ◽

Large Scale ◽

Temporal Structure ◽

Scale Space ◽

Event Memory ◽

Memory Processing ◽

Map Construction ◽

And Gender

When a person explores a new environment, they begin to construct a spatial representation of it. Doing so is important for navigating and remaining oriented. How does one’s ability to learn a new environment relate to one’s ability to remember experiences in that environment? Here, 208 adults experienced a first-person videotaped route, and then completed a spatial map construction task. They also took tests of general cognitive abilities (working memory, laboratory episodic memory, processing speed, general knowledge) and of memory for familiar, everyday activities (event memory). Regression analyses revealed that event memory (memory for everyday events and their temporal structure), laboratory episodic memory (memory for words and pictures) and gender were unique predictors of spatial memory. These results implicate the processing of temporal structure and organization as an important cognitive ability in large-scale spatial memory from route experience. Accounting for the temporal structure of people’s experience while learning the layout of novel spaces may improve interventions for addressing navigation problems.

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The history of scatter hoarding studies

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rstb.2009.0217 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 365 (1542) ◽

pp. 869-881 ◽

Cited By ~ 37

Author(s):

Anders Brodin

Keyword(s):

Spatial Memory ◽

Large Scale ◽

Empirical Studies ◽

Field Studies ◽

General Interest ◽

Scatter Hoarding ◽

Long Time ◽

History Of ◽

Theoretical Paper ◽

The 1960S

In this review, I will present an overview of the development of the field of scatter hoarding studies. Scatter hoarding is a conspicuous behaviour and it has been observed by humans for a long time. Apart from an exceptional experimental study already published in 1720, it started with observational field studies of scatter hoarding birds in the 1940s. Driven by a general interest in birds, several ornithologists made large-scale studies of hoarding behaviour in species such as nutcrackers and boreal titmice. Scatter hoarding birds seem to remember caching locations accurately, and it was shown in the 1960s that successful retrieval is dependent on a specific part of the brain, the hippocampus. The study of scatter hoarding, spatial memory and the hippocampus has since then developed into a study system for evolutionary studies of spatial memory. In 1978, a game theoretical paper started the era of modern studies by establishing that a recovery advantage is necessary for individual hoarders for the evolution of a hoarding strategy. The same year, a combined theoretical and empirical study on scatter hoarding squirrels investigated how caches should be spaced out in order to minimize cache loss, a phenomenon sometimes called optimal cache density theory. Since then, the scatter hoarding paradigm has branched into a number of different fields: (i) theoretical and empirical studies of the evolution of hoarding, (ii) field studies with modern sampling methods, (iii) studies of the precise nature of the caching memory, (iv) a variety of studies of caching memory and its relationship to the hippocampus. Scatter hoarding has also been the subject of studies of (v) coevolution between scatter hoarding animals and the plants that are dispersed by these.

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How is the moral stance related to the intentional stance and group thinking?

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x19002413 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 43 ◽

Author(s):

Hannes Rakoczy

Keyword(s):

Natural History ◽

Social Cognitive ◽

Intentional Stance ◽

Cognitive Capacities ◽

Shared Intentionality ◽

History Of ◽

Group Thinking ◽

Moral Stance

Abstract The natural history of our moral stance told here in this commentary reveals the close nexus of morality and basic social-cognitive capacities. Big mysteries about morality thus transform into smaller and more manageable ones. Here, I raise questions regarding the conceptual, ontogenetic, and evolutionary relations of the moral stance to the intentional and group stances and to shared intentionality.

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