Abstract
Animals may memorise spatial and social information for many months and even years. Here, we investigated long-term memory of hierarchically ordered relationships, where the position of a reward depended on the relationship of a stimulus relative to other stimuli in the hierarchy. Seventeen greylag geese (Anser anser) had been trained on discriminations between successive pairs of five or seven implicitly ordered colours, where the higher ranking colour in each pair was rewarded. Geese were re-tested on the task 2, 6 and 12 months after learning the dyadic colour relationships. They chose the correct colour above chance at all three points in time, whereby performance was better in colour pairs at the beginning or end of the colour series. Nonetheless, they also performed above chance on internal colour pairs, which is indicative of long-term memory for quantitative differences in associative strength and/or for relational information. There were no indications for a decline in performance over time, indicating that geese may remember dyadic relationships for at least 6 months and probably well over 1 year. Furthermore, performance in the memory task was unrelated to the individuals’ sex and their performance while initially learning the dyadic colour relationships. We discuss possible functions of this long-term memory in the social domain.
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Acknowledgments
We thank K. Kotrschal and C. Schloegl for permanent support, and the associate editor and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the manuscript. B. Weiß was funded by La Fondation Pierre Mercier pour la Science, I. Scheiber was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF Projects #P21489-B17 and P20538-B17) and an Erasmus Mundus Scholarship funded by the European Union. Permanent support to the KLF is provided by the “Verein der Förderer” and the “Herzog von Cumberland Stiftung”.
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Ethical Standards
Participation of the animals in the experiments was voluntary and experiments complied with the current laws of Austria.
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Weiß, B.M., Scheiber, I.B.R. Long-term memory of hierarchical relationships in free-living greylag geese. Anim Cogn 16, 91–97 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-012-0554-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-012-0554-2