The Temporal Context of Spatial Memory

Foraging strategies provide an effective and convenient means of investigating some characteristics of animal intelligence. The temporal and spatial distributions of food in the environment are not entirely random, and animals that use information about these patterns can gain an adaptive advantage over animals that do not. For some types of strategies to be effective, the animal must remember the temporal context of a visit to a spatial location and use this memory to make decisions about the current distribution of food in the environment. Experiments with different species (rat, Hawaiian honeycreeper, Marsh tit, Clark's nutcracker) have used variations of a delayed conditional discrimination to examine the cognitive processes influencing this type of memory. These include: primacy, recency, proactive interference, retroactive interference, decay, consolidation, and chunking. The results of these experiments provide information about the types of memory processes that animals use when searching for food, and illustrate the usefulness of combining psychological and ethological approaches when studying animal intelligence.