Food Storing, Memory, and Neurogenesis in Black-Capped Chickadees
Black-capped chickadees remember the locations of large numbers of scattered food caches. Because they recover most their caches after a few days, their inventory of caches is dynamic: new sites are continually added and removed from the set of remembered locations. Chickadees also remember what kind of food they have stored and how long ago they stored it. We have used these properties of food-storing behaviour to examine a number of current ideas about animal memory, including “episodic-like” memory, the phenomena of consolidation and re-consolidation, and the role of adult hippocampal neurogenesis in memory. The food-storing behaviour of chickadees makes it possible to observe memory as it operates in nature and investigate how memory functions to solve specific ecological problems animals encounter in the wild.