Wilkie D M, Carr J A, Siegenthaler A, Lenger B, Liu M, Kwok M
Department of Psychology, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6TIZ4, Canada.
Behav Processes. 1996 Oct;38(1):77-88. doi: 10.1016/0376-6357(96)00026-5.
Encoding the spatial location and the time at which significant biological events occur is thought to be a fundamental way in which one form of memory is organized in animals (Gallistel, 1990, The Organization of Learning. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). If this is true, one would expect to find evidence of this process in a wide variety of animals and in a wide number of situations. We report field observations of scavenging birds at two outdoor locations at which people tend to congregate and eat food, primarily around midday. Scavenging birds appeared to anticipate this peak in food availability and arrived at these locations before the number of people was at a maximum; time of day, not the absolute number of people, was the best predictor of the number of birds at both sites. At a third location where food is not consumed this relationship was not observed. Taken together these observations support the notion that animals represent the spatial and temporal characteristics of biologically important events and use this knowledge to forage efficiently.
对重要生物事件发生的空间位置和时间进行编码，被认为是动物组织某种记忆形式的一种基本方式（加利斯泰尔，1990年，《学习的组织》。麻省理工学院出版社，马萨诸塞州剑桥）。如果这是真的，人们会期望在各种各样的动物和许多情况下找到这一过程的证据。我们报告了在两个户外场所对食腐鸟类的实地观察，这两个场所人们往往聚集在一起进食，主要是在中午前后。食腐鸟类似乎预见到了食物可得性的这个高峰，并在人数达到最多之前到达这些场所；一天中的时间，而非绝对人数，是两个场所鸟类数量的最佳预测指标。在第三个不消费食物的场所，没有观察到这种关系。综合这些观察结果支持了这样一种观点，即动物能够表征具有生物学重要性事件的空间和时间特征，并利用这些知识进行高效觅食。
