Papers in the Biological Sciences

 

Date of this Version

1995

Comments

Published in Journal of Comparative Psychology 109:2 (1995), pp. 173-181; doi: 10.1037/0735-7036.109.2.173 Copyright © 1995 American Psychological Association. Used by permission. “This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.”

Abstract

The performance of 4 seed-caching corvid species was tested using 2 different operant nonmatching tasks. These species differ in their dependence on stored food, and differences in spatial memory tests have been correlated with better performance by the more cache-dependent species. Acquisition and retention of a color non-matching-to-sample task was tested in Experiment 1. Acquisition of the color task was not correlated with cache dependence, and no differences between species in performance during memory testing were found. Acquisition and retention of an operant spatial non-matching-to-sample task was tested in Experiment 2. Species differences in the spatial task were found for acquisition and during retention testing. The influence of natural history on the evolution of memory is discussed.

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