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Life Sciences Commons

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Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

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Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences

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1994

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

The Effects Of Requiring Different Response Strategies Following Caching In Clark’S Nutcrackers (Nucifraga Columbiana), Alan Kamil, Russell P. Balda, Deborah J. Olson Jan 1994

The Effects Of Requiring Different Response Strategies Following Caching In Clark’S Nutcrackers (Nucifraga Columbiana), Alan Kamil, Russell P. Balda, Deborah J. Olson

Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences

Clark’s nutcrackers use spatial memory to recover stored food in the field and have performed very well in laboratory tests of spatial memory. During the present experiment, two groups of nutcrackers cached seeds every 4 days. Following each cache session, the stay group was tested with seeds in their caches; the shift group found seeds in novel sites. The stay group performed accurately throughout the experiment, but the shift group gave no indication of being able to learn to avoid sites where they had stored seeds. These results suggest that although nutcrackers can learn to shift away from remembered locations …


Performance Of Four Seed-Caching Corvid Species In The Radial-Arm Maze Analog, Alan Kamil, Russell P. Balda, Deborah J. Olson Jan 1994

Performance Of Four Seed-Caching Corvid Species In The Radial-Arm Maze Analog, Alan Kamil, Russell P. Balda, Deborah J. Olson

Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences

Four seed-caching corvid species were tested in an open-room analog of the radial-arm maze. During Experiment 1, the species more dependent on stored food, Clark’s nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana) and pinyon jays (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus), acquired the task more quickly and to higher accuracy levels than either scrub jays (Aphelocoma coerulescens) or Mexican jays (A. ultramarina). During Experiment 2, performance after retention intervals was tested. When intervals of 30-210 min were tested in ascending order, species differences observed during acquisition were again obtained. However, when intervals of 5-300 min were tested in random order, …