THE EFFECTS OF REQUIRING DIFFERENT RESPONSE STRATEGICS FOLLOWING CACHING IN CLARK NUTCRACKERS (NUCIFRAGA-COLUMBIANA)

Clark's nutcrackers use spatial memory to recover stored food in the f ield and have performed very well in laboratory tests of spatial memor y. During the present experiment, two groups of nutcrackers cached see ds every 4 days. Following each cache session, the stay group was test ed with seeds in their caches; the shift group found seeds in novel si tes. The stay group performed accurately throughout the experiment, bu t the shift group gave no indication of being able to learn to avoid s ites where they had stored seeds. These results suggest that although nutcrackers can learn to shift away from remembered locations during s ome memory experiments, they cannot learn to shift away from cache sit es. This raises interesting questions about the relationship between t ask characteristics, response strategies, and memory.