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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Does Seed-Caching Experience Affect Spatial Memory Performance By Pinyon Jays?, B. Lucas Stafford, Russell P. Balda, Alan Kamil
Does Seed-Caching Experience Affect Spatial Memory Performance By Pinyon Jays?, B. Lucas Stafford, Russell P. Balda, Alan Kamil
Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences
Food-storing birds use spatial memory to find previously cached food items. Throughout winter, pinyon jays (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus) rely heavily on cached pinyon pine (Pinus edulis) seeds. Because of a recent severe drought, pinyon pine trees had not produced a significant seed crop for several years. Therefore, 1- and 2-year-old birds never had the opportunity to cache and recover seeds and birds 4 or more years of age had not recovered seeds in 3 years. This study examined whether natural but extreme variability in experience might result in differences in abstract spatial memory ability during a non-cache …
Linking Life Zones, Life History Traits, Ecology, And Spatial Cognition In Four Allopatric Southwestern Seed Caching Corvids, Russell P. Balda, Alan Kamil
Linking Life Zones, Life History Traits, Ecology, And Spatial Cognition In Four Allopatric Southwestern Seed Caching Corvids, Russell P. Balda, Alan Kamil
Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences
This report will review the similarities and differences of four species of pine seed caching members of the avian family Corvidae that live on the slopes and base of the San Francisco Peaks in north-central Arizona. The four species include the Clark’s nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana), pinyon jay (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus), western scrub-jay (Aphelocoma californica), and Mexican jay (A. ultramarina). These corvids demonstrate a specialization gradient for the harvesting, transporting, caching and recovering of buried pine seeds. This gradient is reflected in their dependence on cached pine seeds for winter and early spring survival …
Spatial Heterogeneity, Predator Cognition, And The Evolution Of Color Polymorphism In Virtual Prey, Alan B. Bond, Alan Kamil
Spatial Heterogeneity, Predator Cognition, And The Evolution Of Color Polymorphism In Virtual Prey, Alan B. Bond, Alan Kamil
Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences
Cryptically colored prey species are often polymorphic, occurring in multiple distinctive pattern variants. Visual predators promote such phenotypic variation through apostatic selection, in which they attack more abundant prey types disproportionately often. In heterogeneous environments, disruptive selection to match the coloration of disparate habitat patches could also produce polymorphism, but how apostatic and disruptive selection interact in these circumstances is unknown. Here we report the first controlled selection experiment on the evolution of prey coloration on heterogeneous backgrounds, in which blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata) searched for digital moths on mixtures of dark and light patches at three different …
Social Play In Kakapo (Strigops Habroptilus) With Comparisons To Kea (Nestor Notabilis) And Kaka (Nestor Meridionalis), Judy Diamond, Daryl Eason, Clio Reid, Alan B. Bond
Social Play In Kakapo (Strigops Habroptilus) With Comparisons To Kea (Nestor Notabilis) And Kaka (Nestor Meridionalis), Judy Diamond, Daryl Eason, Clio Reid, Alan B. Bond
Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences
The play behavior of the critically endangered kakapo (Strigops habroptilus; Aves: Psittaciformes: Psittacidae) is here compared to that of its closest relatives, the kea (Nestor notabilis) and the kaka (Nestor meridionalis). Contrasting kakapos, which are relatively solitary, with the more social Nestor parrots provides an attractive test of the relative contributions of phylogeny and sociality to the evolution of play. Overlapping cluster analysis of play sequences using a hypergeometric similarity metric indicated that kakapo play is generally less complex, lacking the intensity, duration, structure, and reciprocity of play in the Nestor parrots. Kakapos have …
Interference Effects In The Memory For Serially Presented Locations In Clark’S Nutcrackers, Nucifraga Columbiana, Jody L. Lewis, Alan C. Kamil
Interference Effects In The Memory For Serially Presented Locations In Clark’S Nutcrackers, Nucifraga Columbiana, Jody L. Lewis, Alan C. Kamil
Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences
The authors tested the spatial memory of serially presented locations in Clark’s nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana). Birds were serially presented with locations in an open room. The authors buried a seed in a sand-filled cup at each location and then tested nutcrackers for their memory for each location in the list by using the cluster method. For each item in the list, the authors opened a cluster of 6 holes. Accuracy was measured by how many tries were required for the bird to find the correct location within each cluster. In Experiments 1 and 2, the authors presented 2 …
Selective Attention, Priming, And Foraging Behavior, Alan Kamil, Alan B. Bond
Selective Attention, Priming, And Foraging Behavior, Alan Kamil, Alan B. Bond
Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences
Animals selectively filter and transform their sensory input, increasing the accuracy with which some stimuli are detected and effectively ignoring others. This filtering process, collectively referred to as “selective attention,” takes place at a variety of different levels in the nervous system. It was described in considerable detail by William James over a century ago (James, 1890/1950) and has been a principal focus of research in cognitive psychology for nearly 50 years (Parasuraman & Davies, 1984; Pashler, 1998; Richards, 1998). Investigations of selective attention have also been central to the study of animal cognition, where the process of attention has …