Hoarding titmice predominantly use Familiarity, and not Recollection, when remembering cache locations.

ABSTRACT: Scatter-hoarding birds find their caches using spatial memory and have an enlarged hippocampus. Finding a cache site could be achieved using either Recollection (a discrete recalling of previously experienced information) or Familiarity (a feeling of "having encountered something before"). In humans, these two processes can be distinguished using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. ROC curves for olfactory memory in rats have shown the hippocampus is involved in Recollection, but not Familiarity. We test the hypothesis that food-hoarding birds, having a larger hippocampus, primarily use Recollection to find their caches. We validate a novel method of constructing ROC curves in humans and apply this method to cache retrieval by coal tits (Periparus ater). Both humans and birds m

SUBMITTER: Smulders TV 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10769918 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature