title: Errors made by animals in memory paradigms are not always due to failure of memory.
abstract: It is commonly assumed that errors in animal memory paradigms such as delayed matching to sample, radial mazes, and food-cache recovery are due to failures in memory for information necessary to perform the task successfully. A body of research, reviewed here, suggests that this is not always the case: animals sometimes make errors despite apparently being able to remember the appropriate information. In this paper a case study of this phenomenon is described, along with a demonstration of a simple procedural modification that successfully reduced these non-memory errors, thereby producing a better measure of memory.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
authors.forename: D M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Wilkie
authors.forename: R J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Willson
authors.forename: J A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Carr
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*