Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge MA 02138;
Department of Biodiversity and Molecular Ecology, Research and Innovation Centre, Fondazione Edmund Mach, 38010 San Michele all'Adige, Italy.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2021 Apr 13;118(15). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2014856118.
Many animals restrict their movements to a characteristic home range. This constrained pattern of space use is thought to result from the foraging benefits of memorizing the locations and quality of heterogeneously distributed resources. However, due to the confounding effects of sensory perception, the role of memory in home-range movement behavior lacks definitive evidence in the wild. Here, we analyze the foraging decisions of a large mammal during a field resource manipulation experiment designed to disentangle the effects of memory and perception. We parametrize a mechanistic model of spatial transitions using experimental data to quantify the cognitive processes underlying animal foraging behavior and to predict how individuals respond to resource heterogeneity in space and time. We demonstrate that roe deer () rely on memory, not perception, to track the spatiotemporal dynamics of resources within their home range. Roe deer foraging decisions were primarily based on recent experience (half-lives of 0.9 and 5.6 d for attribute and spatial memory, respectively), enabling them to adapt to sudden changes in resource availability. The proposed memory-based model was able to both quantify the cognitive processes underlying roe deer behavior and accurately predict how they shifted resource use during the experiment. Our study highlights the fact that animal foraging decisions are based on incomplete information on the locations of available resources, a factor that is critical to developing accurate predictions of animal spatial behavior but is typically not accounted for in analyses of animal movement in the wild.
许多动物将其活动限制在特定的家域范围内。这种受约束的空间利用模式被认为是由于记住异质分布资源的位置和质量的觅食益处所致。然而，由于感官知觉的混杂影响，记忆在家域运动行为中的作用在野外缺乏明确的证据。在这里，我们分析了一种大型哺乳动物在野外资源管理实验中的觅食决策，该实验旨在厘清记忆和感知的影响。我们使用实验数据参数化空间转移的机制模型，以量化动物觅食行为的认知过程，并预测个体如何响应空间和时间上的资源异质性。我们证明，狍（）依靠记忆而不是感知来跟踪其家域内资源的时空动态。狍的觅食决策主要基于最近的经验（属性和空间记忆的半衰期分别为 0.9 和 5.6 天），使它们能够适应资源可用性的突然变化。所提出的基于记忆的模型不仅能够量化狍行为的认知过程，而且能够准确预测它们在实验期间如何改变资源利用。我们的研究强调了这样一个事实，即动物的觅食决策是基于对可用资源位置的不完全信息做出的，这是对动物空间行为进行准确预测的关键因素，但在野外动物运动分析中通常未考虑到这一因素。
