Shettleworth Sara J
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont., M5S 3G3, Canada.
Brain Behav Evol. 2003;62(2):108-16. doi: 10.1159/000072441.
The three-way association among food-storing behavior, spatial memory, and hippocampal enlargement in some species of birds is widely cited as an example of a new 'cognitive ecology' or 'neuroecology.' Whether this relationship is as strong as it first appears and whether it might be evidence for an adaptive specialization of memory and hippocampus in food-storers have recently been the subject of some controversy [Bolhuis and Macphail, 2001; Macphail and Bolhuis, 2001]. These critiques are based on misconceptions about the nature of adaptive specializations in cognition, misconceptions about the uniformity of results to be expected from applying the comparative method to data from a wide range of species, and a narrow view of what kinds of cognitive adaptations are theoretically interesting. New analyses of why food-storers (black-capped chickadees, Poecile Atricapilla) respond preferentially to spatial over color cues when both are relevant in a memory task show that this reflects a relative superiority of spatial memory as compared to memory for color rather than exceptional spatial attention or spatial discrimination ability. New studies of chickadees from more or less harsh winter climates also support the adaptive specialization hypothesis and suggest that within-species comparisons may be especially valuable for unraveling details of the relationships among ecology, memory, and brain in food-storing species.
在一些鸟类物种中，食物储存行为、空间记忆和海马体增大之间的三方关联被广泛引为一种新的“认知生态学”或“神经生态学”的例证。这种关系是否如最初看起来那样紧密，以及它是否可能是食物储存者记忆和海马体适应性特化的证据，最近成为了一些争议的焦点[博尔胡伊斯和麦克菲尔，2001；麦克菲尔和博尔胡伊斯，2001]。这些批评基于对认知适应性特化本质的误解、对将比较方法应用于来自广泛物种的数据所期望结果一致性的误解，以及对理论上有趣的认知适应类型的狭隘看法。对食物储存者（黑头山雀，Poecile Atricapilla）在记忆任务中当空间线索和颜色线索都相关时为何优先对空间线索而非颜色线索做出反应的新分析表明，这反映出空间记忆相对于颜色记忆具有相对优势，而非超常的空间注意力或空间辨别能力。对来自或多或少严酷冬季气候的山雀的新研究也支持适应性特化假说，并表明物种内比较对于揭示食物储存物种中生态、记忆和大脑之间关系的细节可能特别有价值。
