Clever Corvids: now New Zealand robins show memory (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, February 19, 2020, 18:22 (1739 days ago) @ David Turell

All animals with a brain and some even without can be trained. These robins show training memory over a period of time:

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/wild-birds-remember-a-novel-task-for-nearly-...

"New Zealand’s North Island robins (Petroica longipes), known as toutouwai in Maori, are capable of remembering a foraging task taught to them by researchers for up to 22 months in the wild, according to a study published on February 12 in Biology Letters. These results echo the findings of a number of laboratory studies of long-term memory in animals, but offer a rare example of a wild animal retaining a learned behavior with no additional training.

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"In the new study, Shaw and her coauthor, Annette Harvey, tested 32 of the initial 64 birds that were trained in 2015 and 2016 and banded for individual identification, 30 of which performed the memory task by spontaneously pecking the lids and opening them on their first try. None of the trained birds had seen the box between the initial training and retesting, though some of the untrained control birds had encountered the apparatus in a previous research project. The time between when the birds had first learned the lid-opening behavior and subsequent testing ranged from 10 to 22 months. By contrast, the 17 untrained birds were unable to complete the task.

"According to Shaw, the two outliers that didn’t remember the task may have been exceptions to the rule. One of the trained birds was a female that had taken the longest to initially learn the task, and whose dominant male partner interfered with testing. The other bird was old and unwell, and disappeared a few weeks after the experiment.

"While Shaw was impressed by her subjects’ performance, Pravosudov says, “I’ve been studying these questions for a long time. It’s not surprising.” Nevertheless, he adds, “it’s good to have more evidence accumulated that the animals are capable of this.” For instance, he cites lab studies that have shown pigeons’ ability to remember and identify photographs and drawings for more than 730 days, and tortoises’ ability to retain an operant conditioning task for nine years. Lab research on Clark’s nutcrackers and chickadees has also found that the birds can remember the locations of hundreds of seeds for six months or more.

“'All animals have some basic memories,” he says, “and we may underappreciate how good . . . even [basic] memory is.'”

Comment: It appears all animal brains have the capacity of memory. It is an important way to remember where fresh food or stored food. All animals must have energy to eat to survive.