Hippocampus and memory for food caches in black-capped chickadees.

Abstract

Black-capped chickadees and other food-storing birds recover their scattered caches by remembering the spatial locations of cache sites. Bilateral hippocampal aspiration reduced the accuracy of cache recovery by chickadees to the chance rate, but it did not reduce the amount of caching or the number of attempts to recover caches. In a second experiment, hippocampal aspiration dissociated performance of a task requiring memory for places from performance of a task requiring memory for cues associated with food, disrupting the former but not the latter