<aside> 📙 Domjan Chapter 12: pp343-349 (section 12-1)

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• Studies of food caching → major source of information about spatial memory + episodic memory in nonhuman species
• “language is a collection of cognitive skills”

Food Caching and Recovery

• Many avian and mammalian species store food in various places and visit caches later to recover the stored food items
• Clark’s nutcracker = caching king!
  • Live in alpine areas in western US
  • Harvest seeds from pine cones in late summer + early autumn
  • Hide the seeds in underground caches and recover them in winter/spring when other food sources are scarce
  • They may store as many as 33,000 seeds in caches of 4 or 5 seeds each
  • Recover thousands next winter
• Caching behavior is related to ecological factors and varies among species
• Black-capped chickadees
  • Living in Alaska and Colorado
    • Both have harsh winters, but Alaska weather is more difficult
  • Alaska chickadees stored more food and were fasting in cache recovery
• Food caching factors:
  • Decide what food item to cache
    • Nonperishable food is a better move to store
  • Decide where to store the food
  • Social component: only useful if you (not a competitor) get to eat what you store
    • Can’t make the caching location too easy to find
  • Recovery also has a lot of factors
    • Where to look, check for competitors, which foods to retrieve first, eat or store again the recovered food
• Food caching + recovery is a rich source of information about comparative cognition

Spatial Memory in Food Caching and Recovery

• Lab studies of caching: designed to isolate one or two variables to permit close examination of how those factors contribute to food caching + recovery
• Cache recovery reflects spatial memory
• Memory of nutcrackers for spatial location of cached food lasts as long as 285 days

Episodic Memory in Food Caching and Recovery

• Episodic memory: memory for a specific event or episode (contrasted with memory for general facts or ways of doing things)
• Can be very rich in detail
  • What happened, where it happened, when it happened
• Reliving a past experience, but aware that it was the past and that you are remembering it
• There were claims that episodic memory is a uniquely human trait
• Clayton, Bussey, and Dickinson have argued that episodic memory in nonhuman species has to do with content
  • The memory has to include information about what happened, when it happened, where it happened
  • This all has to be integrated into a coherent representation rather than be independent bits of information
  • Integrated representation has to be available for flexible use in dealing with new problems