Some characteristics of spatial associative memory in the pigeon, Columba livia

Willson and Wilkie (1993) developed a novel procedure to assess pigeons' memory for the spatial location of food. Only one of four locations provided food each daily session. Each location consisted of an illuminated pecking key and grain feeder. Over different days different locations, randomly selected, provided food during a 16-min session. The pigeons tended to revisit the location at which food was found on the previous day thereby demonstrating memory for food-spatial location associations over 24 h. Three experiments were conducted to further investigate this phenomenon. In Experiment 1 the session duration was varied between 4 and 32 min. Longer sessions had no detectable effect on their ability to remember the rewarded location 24 h later, a result that suggests that only brief encounters with food at a particular location are necessary for recall. In Experiment 2 the necessity of an active search for the day's rewarded location was removed; a 5-min period in which only the rewarded key was lit preceded the regular 16-min session. Pecks to the lit key in this 5-min period produced grain on the standard schedule. This manipulation facilitated the pigeons' discovery of food but did not affect their ability to remember the rewarded location, suggesting that the process of search and discovery is not essential to the associative memory process. In Experiment 3, food was available during the complete session (non-depleting condition) or was available only during the first half of the session (depleting condition). No detectable differences in the birds' memory of yesterday's profitable location were found. This suggests that non-depletion of food is not a necessary condition for day-to-day recall of food location. Taken together these findings enlarge our understanding of the spatial associative memory process.