Cognitive control of memory in a food-storing and a non-storing bird species
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scatter hoarding black-capped chickadees use memory to relocate hidden food, often after delays of hours or days. The ability of these birds to maintain accurate memories of the location and current status of many food caches while engaging in other distracting daily activities suggests that their memory may be especially resistant to competing cognitive load. We measured resistance to competing cognitive load during spatial memory tests in black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) and a non-caching species, dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis). Birds were presented with two types of task. In the Discrimination task, birds learned by trial-and-error to select a target from among 2 distractors. In the Match-to-Sample task, birds viewed a sample which they had to remember in order to correctly select it from among two distractors at test. On two-thirds of trials, the tasks were presented Stand-Alone: after birds initiated a trial, they completed either a Discrimination or a Match-to-Sample task. The remaining trials were Concurrent causing a competing cognitive load: after birds intiated a trial, they saw the sample for the Match-to-Sample task, then completed a Discrimination during the retention interval, and finally completed a Match-to-Sample test. Competing cognitive load reduced accuracy of juncos significantly more than accuracy of chickadees. The need to encode and retain the locations of multiple food caches may have led to the evolution of enhanced cognitive control of memory in black-capped chickadees.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".