Chapter 7 II: Part 2

Question 1

Cognition

Answer 1

• Includes perception, learning, memory, and decision making, in short, all ways in which animals take in information about the world through the senses, process, retain, and decide to act on it

Question 2

What is the function of the hippocampus and how does it help with foraging?

Answer 2

• Controls certain memory tasks:
  Spatial orientation and cognitive memory
• promotes seed caching

Question 3

Seed caching

Answer 3

• Cache thousands of seeds as a means of exploiting temporary food surpluses and providing reserves for future use
• Have significantly larger hippocampal volumes than do other passerine birds
• includes corvidae, Sittidae, and Paridae

Question 4

Describe specific example of seed caching

Answer 4

• Clark’s Nutcracker
• Caches between 22,000 and 33,000 individual pine seeds in more than 2,000 unique cache sites to survive the winter and early spring
• Accurately finds these caches as many as nine months later

Question 5

How can birds figure out how to access difficult food items?

Answer 5

• Many birds, from gulls to raptors, drop hard-shelled prey from the air to crack them open
• example: whelks, come with trade-offs in effort to the process
• Smaller whelks require more and higher drops
• Larger whelks are often stolen by other birds; For these crows, dropping medium–large whelks (red) from a height of 5 meters is optimal (crack easier)
• Larger whelks can be dropped from lower heights with a higher rate of opening success (blue).

Question 6

Object permanence

Answer 6

• memory of objects that are out of view
• can be inferred by crows and parrots
• gray parrots can track a hidden food item under multiple rotations of cups

Question 7

Delay of Gratification

Answer 7

• ability to delay a reward in order to receive a bigger reward; impulse control
• gray parrots only wait a few seconds, while crows and ravens can wait up to five minutes

Question 8

Mental Time Travel

Answer 8

• memory of past episodes and planning ahead
• magpies can remember details of cached food
• Scrub Jays can remember perishability of cached food items, as well as recall episodes of hunger and the places they found more food while in hunger

Question 9

Reasoning

Answer 9

• inferring correct solutions from partial information
• corvids can infer correct solutions by excluding alternatives, as well as gray parrots
• several corvids can infer info of two objects in relation to third object
• gray parrots can apply categories to items verbally

Question 10

metacognition

Answer 10

• awareness about your own knowledge
• large billed crows can evaluate how well they remember a past visual stimulus

Question 11

Mirror Self-recognition

Answer 11

• awareness of your own body
• a portion of magpies can recognize mark placed on own plumage in a mirror
• gray parrots can use mirrors to locate hidden food, but do not engage in self-exploration

Question 12

Theory of mind

Answer 12

• inferring the mental states of others
• some corvids follow gaze of others into the distance
• Scrub jays with prior experience of stealing food caches will move it if seen hiding it by another individual

Question 13

Vocal learning

Answer 13

• vocalization passed on to generations through observance, some can learn calls of other birds

Question 14

Encephalization ratio

Answer 14

• seen in Corvids (Corvidae)
  -(ratio of brain size to body size) similar to that of chimpanzees, and larger than any other bird group, except the psittacids