Department of Psychology, Luther College, 700 College Drive, Decorah, IA 52101, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2010 Mar 27;365(1542):901-14. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0214.
Many animals use cues for small-scale navigation, including beacons, landmarks, compasses and geometric properties. Scatter-hoarding animals are a unique system to study small-scale navigation. They have to remember and relocate many individual spatial locations, be fairly accurate in their searching and have to remember these locations for long stretches of time. In this article, we review what is known about cue use in both scatter-hoarding birds and rodents. We discuss the importance of local versus global cues, the encoding of bearings and geometric rules, the use of external compasses such as the Sun and the influence of the shape of experimental enclosures in relocating caches or hidden food. Scatter-hoarding animals are highly flexible in how and what they encode. There also appear to be differences in what scatter-hoarding birds and rodents encode, as well as what scatter-hoarding animals in general encode compared with other animals. Areas for future research with scatter-hoarding animals are discussed in light of what is currently known.
许多动物使用线索进行小规模导航，包括信标、地标、罗盘和几何特征。分散贮藏动物是研究小规模导航的独特系统。它们必须记住和重新找到许多个体的空间位置，在搜索时要相当准确，并长时间记住这些位置。在本文中，我们回顾了关于分散贮藏鸟类和啮齿动物中线索使用的知识。我们讨论了局部线索与全局线索的重要性，方位的编码和几何规则，太阳等外部罗盘的使用，以及在重新定位藏物或隐藏食物时实验围栏形状的影响。分散贮藏动物在如何和如何编码方面具有很高的灵活性。似乎在分散贮藏鸟类和啮齿动物所编码的内容以及一般分散贮藏动物与其他动物所编码的内容方面也存在差异。根据目前的知识，我们讨论了未来在分散贮藏动物方面的研究领域。
