SPATIAL MEMORY OF PARIDAE - COMPARISON OF A STORING AND A NONSTORING SPECIES, THE COAL TIT, PARUS-ATER, AND THE GREAT TIT, P-MAJOR

The performances of the coal tit (a food storer) and the great tit (a non-storer) were compared in two experiments in which the bird was rewarded in phase 2 of a trial for returning to sites where it had seen food in phase 1 ('window-shopping'). In both experiments the differences in performance between the species were small. In the first experiment the storing species was better than the non-storer at returning to the site where it had seen a seed, and in the second experiment the storing species was better at discriminating in phase 2 between sites visited in phase 1 that contained a seed and sites visited in phase 1 that were empty. A third experiment demonstrated that the motivational variables of reward size and deprivation were unlikely to account for the difference between the species. The results might indicate that there are differences in the spatial memory of the storing and non-storing species, but a difference in perceptual discrimination cannot be excluded. © 1990 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.