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Flexible use of memory by food-caching birds

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...

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Autores principales: Applegate, Marissa C, Aronov, Dmitriy
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9038193/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35467526
http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.70600
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author Applegate, Marissa C
Aronov, Dmitriy
author_facet Applegate, Marissa C
Aronov, Dmitriy
author_sort Applegate, Marissa C
collection PubMed
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.
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spelling pubmed-90381932022-04-26 Flexible use of memory by food-caching birds Applegate, Marissa C Aronov, Dmitriy eLife Neuroscience 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. eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd 2022-04-25 /pmc/articles/PMC9038193/ /pubmed/35467526 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.70600 Text en © 2022, Applegate and Aronov https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Neuroscience
Applegate, Marissa C
Aronov, Dmitriy
Flexible use of memory by food-caching birds
title Flexible use of memory by food-caching birds
title_full Flexible use of memory by food-caching birds
title_fullStr Flexible use of memory by food-caching birds
title_full_unstemmed Flexible use of memory by food-caching birds
title_short Flexible use of memory by food-caching birds
title_sort flexible use of memory by food-caching birds
topic Neuroscience
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9038193/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35467526
http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.70600
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