Topic: food caching

The brain's extraordinary abilities are often associated with its ability to learn and adapt. But memory and plasticity, in general, have their limitations, especially when faced with the tasks such as retrieving hundreds of thousands of items, such as in the case of scatter-hoarding animals. Here, we present a brain mechanism that works by utilizing cryptographic principles in lieu of plasticity. Rather than memorizing the locations of their caches, as previously suggested, we propose that cache-hoarding animals use a single cryptographic-like mechanism for both caching and retrieval. The mod

How does the brain record individual experiences, and recall them to adaptively guide future behavior? This ‘episodic-like’ memory regime involves the hippocampus, but it has been difficult to identify specific neural signatures with recollection of specific memories, hindering a mechanistic understanding of recall. Studying food caching behaviors may provide a clearer picture. Scatter hoarding species, such as chickadees, cache individual food items, and use hippocampal-dependent memory to later retrieve them. However tools for behavioral and neural measurement in chickadees are underdevelope

Spatial memory in vertebrates requires brain regions homologous to the mammalian hippocampus. Between vertebrate clades, however, these regions are anatomically distinct and appear to produce different spatial patterns of neural activity. We asked whether hippocampal activity is fundamentally different even between distant vertebrates that share a strong dependence on spatial memory. We studied tufted titmice – food-caching birds capable of remembering many concealed food locations. We found mammalian-like neural activity in the titmouse hippocampus, including sharp-wave ripples and anatomical