Gibbs Sasha E B, Lea Stephen E G, Jacobs Lucia F
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1650, USA.
Anim Cogn. 2007 Apr;10(2):203-9. doi: 10.1007/s10071-006-0059-y. Epub 2007 Jan 31.
Insects, birds, and mammals have been shown capable of encoding spatial information in memory using multiple strategies or frames of reference simultaneously. These strategies include orientation to a goal-specific cue or beacon, to the position of the goal in an array of local landmarks, or to its position in the array of distant landmarks, also known as the global frame of reference. From previous experiments, it appears that birds and mammals that scatter hoard rely primarily on a global frame of reference, but this generalization depends on evidence from only a few species. Here we examined spatial memory in a previously unstudied scatter hoarder, the southern flying squirrel. We dissociated the relative weighting of three potential spatial strategies (beacon, global, or relative array strategy) with three probe tests: transposition of beacon and the rotation or the expansion of the array. The squirrels' choices were consistent with a spatial averaging strategy, where they chose the location dictated by at least two of the three strategies, rather than using a single preferred frame of reference. This adaptive and flexible heuristic has not been previously described in animal orientation studies, yet it may be a common solution to the universal problem of encoding and recalling spatial locations in an ephemeral physical landscape.
昆虫、鸟类和哺乳动物已被证明能够同时使用多种策略或参照系在记忆中编码空间信息。这些策略包括朝向特定目标的线索或信标、目标在一系列局部地标中的位置，或目标在一系列远距离地标中的位置，后者也被称为全局参照系。从先前的实验来看，似乎分散贮藏食物的鸟类和哺乳动物主要依赖全局参照系，但这种概括仅基于少数物种的证据。在这里，我们研究了一种此前未被研究过的分散贮藏者——南方鼯鼠的空间记忆。我们通过三项探测测试来区分三种潜在空间策略（信标、全局或相对阵列策略）的相对权重：信标换位以及阵列的旋转或扩展。松鼠的选择与一种空间平均策略一致，即它们选择由三种策略中的至少两种所指示的位置，而不是使用单一的偏好参照系。这种适应性和灵活性的启发式方法在动物定向研究中此前尚未被描述过，但它可能是在短暂的物理环境中编码和回忆空间位置这一普遍问题的常见解决方案。
