Spatial cognition in three dimensions

To date, most studies of spatial learning have been conducted in the horizontal plane, \nwith few addressing the vertical dimension. I aimed to investigate learning of 3-D \nlocations by wild, free-living hummingbirds and compare them with rats. In my first \nexperiment, I found that hummingbirds can encode a 3-D rewarded location after a \nsingle visit. Using a one-dimensional array, I then found that the birds more readily \nlearned a location in a horizontal than in a vertical linear array. However, the ease of \nlearning was a product not only of the orientation of the array but also of its spacing \nscale. By the end of training, hummingbirds visited the central rewarded flower and \nthe two adjacent flowers more than they visited the distal flowers for all arrays. \nHowever, when the array was horizontal and the flowers spaced 30 cm apart, they \nlearned the absolute location of the rewarded flower. In a diagonal array birds \nlearned the 2-D reward location but they chose at random when tested on a vertically \nor horizontally oriented array. However, when birds trained in the diagonal array \nwere tested on a 180° rotated diagonal array they chose the flower with the same \nhorizontal component as the rewarded flower rather than with the flower with the \nsame vertical component. Finally in order to compare the spatial learning of animals \nthat move in volumes with those who move in two dimensions I trained \nhummingbirds and rats to a rewarded location in a cubic maze. Although both \nhummingbirds and rats learned a 3-D location within a cubic maze, hummingbirds \nappeared to learn the rewarded location as a 3-D coordinate while rats seemed to \nlearn the vertical and horizontal component of the 3-D location independently. In \naddition, hummingbirds were more accurate in the vertical and rats in the horizontal, \nwhich is consistent with their type of locomotion. More experiments in volumetric, terrestrial and climbing animals are needed in order to determine whether the \ncontrasting search strategies and learning accuracies constitute adaptations to \nparticular spatial niches.

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