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Author Tommasi, L.; Vallortigara, G.
Title Searching for the center: spatial cognition in the domestic chick (Gallus gallus) Type Journal Article
Year 2000 Publication Journal of Experimental Psychology. Animal Behavior Processes Abbreviated Journal J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process
Volume 26 Issue 4 Pages (down) 477-486
Keywords Animals; Behavior, Animal/physiology; Chickens; Cognition/*physiology; Learning/physiology; Male; Space Perception/*physiology; Spatial Behavior/*physiology
Abstract Chicks learned to find food hidden under sawdust by ground-scratching in the central position of the floor of a closed arena. When tested inan arena of identical shape but a larger area, chicks searched at 2 different locations, one corresponding to the correct distance (i.e., center) in the smaller (training) arena and the other to the actual center of the test arena. When tested in an arena of the same shape but a smaller area, chicks searched in the center of it. These results suggest that chicks are able to encode information on the absolute and relative distance of the food from the walls of the arena. After training in the presence of a landmark located at the center of the arena, animals searched at the center even after the removal of the landmark. Marked changes in the height of the walls of the arena produced some displacement in searching behavior, suggesting that chicks used the angular size of the walls to estimate distances.
Address Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Italy
Corporate Author Thesis
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Language English Summary Language Original Title
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ISSN 0097-7403 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:11056887 Approved no
Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 2774
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Author Kelly, D.M.; Spetch, M.L.
Title Pigeons encode relative geometry Type Journal Article
Year 2001 Publication Journal of Experimental Psychology. Animal Behavior Processes Abbreviated Journal J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process
Volume 27 Issue 4 Pages (down) 417-422
Keywords Animals; Behavior, Animal/physiology; Cognition/*physiology; Columbidae; Discrimination Learning/physiology; Form Perception/*physiology; Space Perception/*physiology
Abstract Pigeons were trained to search for hidden food in a rectangular environment designed to eliminate any external cues. Following training, the authors administered unreinforced test trials in which the geometric properties of the apparatus were manipulated. During tests that preserved the relative geometry but altered the absolute geometry of the environment, the pigeons continued to choose the geometrically correct corners, indicating that they encoded the relative geometry of the enclosure. When tested in a square enclosure, which distorted both the absolute and relative geometry, the pigeons randomly chose among the 4 corners, indicating that their choices were not based on cues external to the apparatus. This study provides new insight into how metric properties of an environment are encoded by pigeons.
Address Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6G 2E9. kelly@bio.psy.ruhr-uni-bochum.de
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 0097-7403 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:11676090 Approved no
Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 2770
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Author Shettleworth, S.J.; Krebs, J.R.
Title How marsh tits find their hoards: the roles of site preference and spatial memory Type Journal Article
Year 1982 Publication Journal of experimental psychology. Animal behavior processes Abbreviated Journal J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process
Volume 8 Issue 4 Pages (down) 354-375
Keywords Animals; *Appetitive Behavior; Birds; Cues; Discrimination Learning; *Memory; *Mental Recall; *Orientation; *Space Perception
Abstract Marsh tits (Parus palustris) store single food items in scattered locations and recover them hours or days later. Some properties of the spatial memory involved were analyzed in two laboratory experiments. In the first, marsh tits were offered 97 sites for storing 12 seeds. They recovered a median of 65% of them 2-3 hr later, making only two errors per seed while doing so. Over trials, they used some sites more often than others, but during recovery they were more likely to visit a site of any preference value if they had stored a seed there that day than if they had not. Recovery performance was much worse if the experimenters moved the seeds between storage and recovery. A fixed search strategy that had some of the same average properties as the tits' search behavior also did worse than the real birds. In Experiment 2, any tendency to visit the same sites on successive daily tests in the aviary was placed in opposition to memory for storage sites by allowing the tits to store more seeds 2 hr after storing a first batch. They tended to avoid individual storage sites holding seeds from the first batch. When the tits searched for all the seeds 2 hr later, they tended to recover more seeds from the second batch than from the first, i.e., there was a recency effect.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 0097-7403 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:7175447 Approved no
Call Number refbase @ user @ Serial 385
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Author Skov-Rackette, S.I.; Miller, N.Y.; Shettleworth, S.J.
Title What-where-when memory in pigeons Type Journal Article
Year 2006 Publication Journal of experimental psychology. Animal behavior processes Abbreviated Journal J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process
Volume 32 Issue 4 Pages (down) 345-358
Keywords Animals; Behavior, Animal/physiology; Columbidae; Conditioning, Operant/physiology; Memory/*physiology; Reinforcement (Psychology); Space Perception/*physiology; Spatial Behavior/physiology; Teaching; Visual Perception/physiology
Abstract The authors report a novel approach to testing episodic-like memory for single events. Pigeons were trained in separate sessions to match the identity of a sample on a touch screen, to match its location, and to report on the length of the retention interval. When these 3 tasks were mixed randomly within sessions, birds were more than 80% correct on each task. However, performance on 2 different tests in succession after each sample was not consistent with an integrated memory for sample location, time, and identity. Experiment 2 tested binding of location and identity memories in 2 different ways. The results were again consistent with independent feature memories. Implications for tests of episodic-like memory are discussed.
Address Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
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ISSN 0097-7403 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:17044738 Approved no
Call Number refbase @ user @ Serial 357
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Author Chiesa, A.D.; Pecchia, T.; Tommasi, L.; Vallortigara, G.
Title Multiple landmarks, the encoding of environmental geometry and the spatial logics of a dual brain Type Journal Article
Year 2006 Publication Animal Cognition Abbreviated Journal Anim. Cogn.
Volume 9 Issue 4 Pages (down) 281-293
Keywords Animals; Association Learning/*physiology; Chickens; *Cues; Dominance, Cerebral/*physiology; *Environment; Exploratory Behavior/*physiology; Logic; Space Perception/*physiology; Spatial Behavior/physiology
Abstract A series of place learning experiments was carried out in young chicks (Gallus gallus) in order to investigate how the geometry of a landmark array and that of a walled enclosure compete when disoriented animals could rely on both of them to re-orient towards the centre of the enclosure. A square-shaped array (four wooden sticks) was placed in the middle of a square-shaped enclosure, the two structures being concentric. Chicks were trained to ground-scratch to search for food hidden in the centre of the enclosure (and the array). To check for effects of array degradation, one, two, three or all landmarks were removed during test trials. Chicks concentrated their searching activity in the central area of the enclosure, but their accuracy was inversely contingent on the number of landmarks removed; moreover, the landmarks still present within the enclosure appeared to influence the shape of the searching patterns. The reduction in the number of landmarks affected the searching strategy of chicks, suggesting that they had focussed mainly on local cues when landmarks were present within the enclosure. When all the landmarks were removed, chicks searched over a larger area, suggesting an absolute encoding of distances from the local cues and less reliance on the relationships provided by the geometry of the enclosure. Under conditions of monocular vision, chicks tended to rely on different strategies to localize the centre on the basis of the eye (and thus the hemisphere) in use, the left hemisphere attending to details of the environment and the right hemisphere attending to the global shape.
Address Department of Psychology and B.R.A.I.N. Centre for Neuroscience, University of Trieste, via S. Anastasio 12, 34100, Trieste, Italy
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1435-9448 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:16941155 Approved no
Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 2443
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Author Sutton, J.E.; Shettleworth, S.J.
Title Internal sense of direction and landmark use in pigeons (Columba livia) Type Journal Article
Year 2005 Publication Journal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) Abbreviated Journal J Comp Psychol
Volume 119 Issue 3 Pages (down) 273-284
Keywords Animals; *Columbidae; Conflict (Psychology); *Cues; Discrimination Learning; Homing Behavior; *Intuition; *Orientation; *Space Perception; Transfer (Psychology); *Visual Perception
Abstract The relative importance of an internal sense of direction based on inertial cues and landmark piloting for small-scale navigation by White King pigeons (Columba livia) was investigated in an arena search task. Two groups of pigeons differed in whether they had access to visual cues outside the arena. In Experiment 1, pigeons were given experience with 2 different entrances and all pigeons transferred accurate searching to novel entrances. Explicit disorientation before entering did not affect accuracy. In Experiments 2-4, landmarks and inertial cues were put in conflict or tested 1 at a time. Pigeons tended to follow the landmarks in a conflict situation but could use an internal sense of direction to search when landmarks were unavailable.
Address Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, ON, Canada. jsutton7@uwo.ca
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 0735-7036 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:16131256 Approved no
Call Number refbase @ user @ Serial 360
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Author Shettleworth, S.J.; Westwood, R.P.
Title Divided attention, memory, and spatial discrimination in food-storing and nonstoring birds, black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapilla) and dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis) Type Journal Article
Year 2002 Publication Journal of experimental psychology. Animal behavior processes Abbreviated Journal J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process
Volume 28 Issue 3 Pages (down) 227-241
Keywords Animals; Attention/*physiology; Behavior, Animal/physiology; Birds; *Discrimination (Psychology); *Food Habits; Memory/*physiology; Space Perception/*physiology; Spatial Behavior/*physiology
Abstract Food-storing birds, black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapilla), and nonstoring birds, dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis), matched color or location on a touch screen. Both species showed a divided attention effect for color but not for location (Experiment 1). Chickadees performed better on location than on color with retention intervals up to 40 s, but juncos did not (Experiment 2). Increasing sample-distractor distance improved performance similarly in both species. Multidimensional scaling revealed that both use a Euclidean metric of spatial similarity (Experiment 3). When choosing between the location and color of a remembered item, food storers choose location more than do nonstorers. These results explain this effect by differences in memory for location relative to color, not division of attention or spatial discrimination ability.
Address Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 Saint George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G3, Canada. shettle@psych.utoronto.ca
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 0097-7403 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:12136700 Approved no
Call Number refbase @ user @ Serial 370
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Author Wallace, D.G.; Hamilton, D.A.; Whishaw, I.Q.
Title Movement characteristics support a role for dead reckoning in organizing exploratory behavior Type Journal Article
Year 2006 Publication Animal Cognition Abbreviated Journal Anim. Cogn.
Volume 9 Issue 3 Pages (down) 219-228
Keywords Animals; *Association Learning; *Exploratory Behavior; Female; *Motor Activity; *Orientation; Problem Solving; Rats; Rats, Long-Evans; Space Perception; *Spatial Behavior
Abstract Rat exploration is an organized series of trips. Each exploratory trip involves an outward tour from the refuge followed by a return to the refuge. A tour consists of a sequence of progressions with variable direction and speed concatenated by stops, whereas the return consists of a single direct progression. We have argued that processing self-movement information generated on the tour allows a rat to plot the return to the refuge. This claim has been supported by observing consistent differences between tour and return segments independent of ambient cue availability; however, this distinction was based on differences in movement characteristics derived from multiple progressions and stops on the tour and the single progression on the return. The present study examines movement characteristics of the tour and return progressions under novel-dark and light conditions. Three novel characteristics of progressions were identified: (1) linear speeds and path curvature of exploratory trips are negatively correlated, (2) tour progression maximum linear speed and temporal pacing varies as a function of travel distance, and (3) return progression movement characteristics are qualitatively different from tour progressions of comparable length. These observations support a role for dead reckoning in organizing exploratory behavior.
Address Psychology Department, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115-2892, USA. dwallace@niu.edu
Corporate Author Thesis
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Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1435-9448 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:16767471 Approved no
Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 2463
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Author Bennett, A.T.
Title Do animals have cognitive maps? Type Journal Article
Year 1996 Publication The Journal of Experimental Biology Abbreviated Journal J Exp Biol
Volume 199 Issue Pt 1 Pages (down) 219-224
Keywords Animals; Cognition/*physiology; Humans; Space Perception/*physiology; Visual Pathways
Abstract Drawing on studies of humans, rodents, birds and arthropods, I show that 'cognitive maps' have been used to describe a wide variety of spatial concepts. There are, however, two main definitions. One, sensu Tolman, O'Keefe and Nadel, is that a cognitive map is a powerful memory of landmarks which allows novel short-cutting to occur. The other, sensu Gallistel, is that a cognitive map is any representation of space held by an animal. Other definitions with quite different meanings are also summarised. I argue that no animal has been conclusively shown to have a cognitive map, sensu Tolman, O'Keefe and Nadel, because simpler explanations of the crucial novel short-cutting results are invariably possible. Owing to the repeated inability of experimenters to eliminate these simpler explanations over at least 15 years, and the confusion caused by the numerous contradictory definitions of a cognitive map, I argue that the cognitive map is no longer a useful hypothesis for elucidating the spatial behaviour of animals and that use of the term should be avoided.
Address Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Adelaide, Australia
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Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 0022-0949 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:8576693 Approved no
Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 2756
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Author Fiset, S.; Leblanc, V.
Title Invisible displacement understanding in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris): the role of visual cues in search behavior Type Journal Article
Year 2007 Publication Animal Cognition Abbreviated Journal Anim. Cogn.
Volume 10 Issue 2 Pages (down) 211-224
Keywords Animals; Dogs/*physiology; Female; Male; *Space Perception; *Spatial Behavior; *Visual Perception
Abstract Recently, (Collier-Baker E, Davis JM, Suddendorf T (2004) J Comp Psychol 118:421-433) suggested that domestic dogs do not understand invisible displacements. In the present study, we further investigated the hypothesis that the search behavior of domestic dogs in invisible displacements is guided by various visual cues inherent to the task rather than by mental representation of an object's past trajectory. Specifically, we examined the role of the experimenter as a function of the final position of the displacement device in the search behavior of domestic dogs. Visible and invisible displacement problems were administered to dogs (N = 11) under two conditions. In the Visible-experimenter condition, the experimenter was visible whereas in the Concealed-experimenter condition, the experimenter was visibly occluded behind a large rigid barrier. Our data supported the conclusion that dogs do not understand invisible displacements but primarily search as a function of the final position of the displacement device and, to a lesser extent, the position of the experimenter.
Address Secteur Sciences Humaines, Universite de Moncton, Campus d'Edmundston, Edmundston, New-Brunswick, E3V 2S8, Canada. sfiset@umce.ca
Corporate Author Thesis
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Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1435-9448 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:17165041 Approved no
Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 2430
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