Memory and Hippocampal Specialization in Food-Storing Birds: Challenges for Research on Comparative Cognition

@article{Shettleworth2003MemoryAH,
  title={Memory and Hippocampal Specialization in Food-Storing Birds: Challenges for Research on Comparative Cognition},
  author={Sara J. Shettleworth},
  journal={Brain, Behavior and Evolution},
  year={2003},
  volume={62},
  pages={108 - 116}
}
  • S. Shettleworth
  • Published 1 August 2003
  • Psychology, Biology
  • Brain, Behavior and Evolution
The three-way association among food-storing behavior, spatial memory, and hippocampal enlargement in some species of birds is widely cited as an example of a new ‘cognitive ecology’ or ‘neuroecology.’ Whether this relationship is as strong as it first appears and whether it might be evidence for an adaptive specialization of memory and hippocampus in food-storers have recently been the subject of some controversy [Bolhuis and Macphail, 2001; Macphail and Bolhuis, 2001]. These critiques are… 
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Memory and brain in food-storing birds: Space oddities or adaptive specializations?
TLDR
The evidence pertaining to a correlation between food-storing capability and the relative volume of the hippocampus is reviewed to determine whether or not food-hoarding birds have evolved adaptive specializations in brain and cognition.
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It is concluded that existing evidence strongly supports the hypothesis that spatial memory and its underlying neural mechanisms respond to selection pressures associated with scattness as a function of differences in the environment.
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The current approach to the comparative cognition of caching capitalizes on an integrative knowledge of behavioral ecology and comparative psychology to pose questions about the selective pressures that drive the evolution of cognitive abilities in food-caching birds, and how a bird's decisions concerning both caching and cache-recovery are shaped by ecological factors.
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To examine how manipulating the foraging context (the type of resource being foraged) could affect the way spatial information is used by the forager, noisy miner birds were given spatial working memory tasks.
Explanations for variation in cognitive ability: Behavioural ecology meets comparative cognition
Integrating ecology, psychology and neurobiology within a food-hoarding paradigm
  • V. Pravosudov, T. Smulders
  • Biology, Psychology
    Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
  • 2010
TLDR
This issue aims to bring together a series of papers providing a modern synthesis of ecology, psychology, physiology and neurobiology and identifying new directions and developments in the use of food-hoarding animals as a model system.
Comparative studies of cognitive abilities in the Paridae : Evidence from laboratory studies
TLDR
Investigation of the cognitive abilities of two members of the Paridae family found cognitive differences between two species that differ in their foraging strategies of these species, and investigates sex differences in cognition in great tits.
A Multi-disciplinary Approach to Understanding Hippocampal Function in Foodhoarding Birds
TLDR
The work that is currently underway to use this system to obtain a better understanding of hippocampal function in general is reviewed and compared to closely-related non-hoarding species.
Flexible cue use in food-caching birds
TLDR
The findings argue against the hypothesis that the memory of spatial cues should always take priority over any non-spatial cues, including color cues, in food-caching species, because in the experiment mountain chickadees chose color over spatial cues.
Sex and species differences in spatial memory in food-storing kangaroo rats
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References

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