SPATIAL ASSOCIATION LEARNING BY HUMMINGBIRDS

The ability of rufous hummingbirds, Selasphorus rufus, to learn spatial associations between cues and rewarding feeders in two experiments was examined. In the first experiment, hummingbirds learned the spatial location of a rewarding feeder in horizontal arrays of six feeders, with and without cues, but learned faster when a constant cue was presented 2.5 cm above the rewarding feeder. Spatial location learning and spatial association learning were possible simultaneously in this experiment and these processes may have interacted. This possibility was removed in a second experiment in which the location of the cue and corresponding rewarding feeder changed randomly between successive feeding trials. Even when hummingbirds could rely only on spatial association learning, they rapidly learned to select correct feeders within a few trials. The distance between cues and feeders used in this experiment (2.5 cm, as in the first experiment) has severely impaired learning by animals in other studies but it had little effect on learning by the hummingbirds. Ecological and physiological characteristics of rufous hummingbirds and features of the experimental procedures used in these experiments may account for their rapid learning. © 1993 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. All rights reserved.