Studies of Animal Cognition

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The research proposed will help us better understand how foraging animals in natural settings encode and remember significant events and locations, such as where and when nutritious sources of food are available, where and when mates can be found, what locations are safe for nests to raise new offspring, and what locations should be avoided because of the presence of predators.  Thus, these findings will be important for animal survival in natural Canadian settings.  This proposal outlines a plan to study foraging and spatial memory in pigeons and rats in experimentally controlled environments. Pigeon behavior will be studied in a new apparatus that consists of a start box with two doors, each of which leads to a large arena or patch. The advantage of these patches is that different food items (grains or pellets) can be arranged in different configurations or in a random pattern. In addition, the proportions of different foods (favored and non-favored) can be varied. Pigeons will be forced to visit the different patches on training trials, and free-choice probe trials will be given to measure patch preference. With this procedure, I will be able to examine pigeons' preferences for different foods, the extent to which percentage of favored vs. non-favored food controls choice under different conditions (such as variation in the total food available), and whether configuration of foods in a patch affects patch preference. In addition, video cameras will record pigeons' foraging behavior in the patches. Thus, we will be able to study patterns of foraging as a function of kinds of foods and their distributions in the patches and to correlate foraging behavior with patch choice on probe trials.  In related work with rats, I will examine how accuracy of working memory on the radial maze is controlled by the pattern of food distribution among the arms of the maze. This work will focus on our recent finding that rats show an isolation effect on the maze. Rats more accurately choose a non-visited arm containing food if that arm has previously visited arms on either side of it than if it has previously non-visited arms on either side of it. The hypothesis will be tested that rats show this effect as an evolved foraging strategy for finding food in a location between two locations where food has been found previously.  I anticipate that this research will help to reveal how cognitive processes in birds and rodents promote their survival through the use of learning and memory to direct behavioural strategies that allow them to efficiently forage for food.  Continuing studies of dog cognition will further reveal how much (or little) dogs' thinking resembles that of humans.