Topic: ZENK

In various situations, individuals can display different attitudes towards novelty. Sometimes individuals gravitate towards novelty while other times they avoid it. This is referred to as neophilia and neophobia respectively. Understanding these opposing attitudes towards novelty can elucidate various aspects of life, like adaptive behavior, memory, and anxiety, but first there need to be reliable paradigms. Recently, attention has been directed toward establishing such paradigms in birds. We administered two tasks assessing neophilia and neophobia in pigeons to measure both behaviors in the s

Spatial cognition is a field of research that investigates the basis of human and animal navigation and orientation. Many animals possess excellent spatial abilities like homing and migration that can be found across the animal kingdom. The hippocampus is an essential brain area for memory formation and spatial cognition in both mammals and birds, which has been shown physiologically in the form of place and head-direction cells as well as functionally through for example ablation studies. However, in contrast to mammals, the precise pattern of hippocampal spatial processing is still rather un