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When a place is not a place: encoding of spatial information is dependent on reward type

When a place is not a place: encoding of spatial information is dependent on reward type <jats:sec><jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The adaptationist perspective investigates how an animal's cognition has been shaped by the informational properties of the environment. The information that is useful may vary from one context to another. In the current study we 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 (omnivorous honeyeaters) were given spatial working memory tasks in which they searched baited and unbaited feeders for either nectar or invertebrates. We hypothesised that noisy miners would encode the locations of baited and unbaited feeders equally well when foraging for nectar (all flowers, whether containing nectar or not are places to remember and avoid while foraging on a plant). When foraging for invertebrates, however, we predicted that noisy miner birds would not encode the locations of unbaited feeders as effectively as baited feeders (in a natural patch of invertebrates there is no cue to differentiate a point location where a prey item has not been found from the rest of the potentially homogenous patch). As predicted, birds foraging for invertebrates made more revisits to unbaited than baited feeders, with no such difference evident when birds were foraging for nectar.</jats:p> </jats:sec> http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Behaviour Brill

When a place is not a place: encoding of spatial information is dependent on reward type

Sulikowski, Danielle; Burke, Darren
Behaviour , Volume 147 (11): 1461 – Jan 1, 2010
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References (35)

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© 2010 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0005-7959
eISSN
1568-539X
DOI
10.1163/000579510X521564
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

<jats:sec><jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The adaptationist perspective investigates how an animal's cognition has been shaped by the informational properties of the environment. The information that is useful may vary from one context to another. In the current study we 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 (omnivorous honeyeaters) were given spatial working memory tasks in which they searched baited and unbaited feeders for either nectar or invertebrates. We hypothesised that noisy miners would encode the locations of baited and unbaited feeders equally well when foraging for nectar (all flowers, whether containing nectar or not are places to remember and avoid while foraging on a plant). When foraging for invertebrates, however, we predicted that noisy miner birds would not encode the locations of unbaited feeders as effectively as baited feeders (in a natural patch of invertebrates there is no cue to differentiate a point location where a prey item has not been found from the rest of the potentially homogenous patch). As predicted, birds foraging for invertebrates made more revisits to unbaited than baited feeders, with no such difference evident when birds were foraging for nectar.</jats:p> </jats:sec>

Journal

Behaviour – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 2010

Keywords: SPATIAL COGNITION; RESOURCE DISTRIBUTION; FORAGING

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