Foraging efficiency in temporally predictable environments: is a long-term temporal memory really advantageous?

ABSTRACT: Cognitive abilities enabling animals that feed on ephemeral but yearly renewable resources to infer when resources are available may have been favoured by natural selection, but the magnitude of the benefits brought by these abilities remains poorly known. Using computer simulations, we compared the efficiencies of three main types of foragers with different abilities to process temporal information, in spatially and/or temporally homogeneous or heterogeneous environments. One was endowed with a sampling memory, which stores recent experience about the availability of the different food types. The other two were endowed with a chronological or associative memory, which stores long-term temporal information about absolute times of these availabilities or delays b

SUBMITTER: Robira B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8456140 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature