title: Three-dimensional space: locomotory style explains memory differences in rats and hummingbirds.
abstract: While most animals live in a three-dimensional world, they move through it to different extents depending on their mode of locomotion: terrestrial animals move vertically less than do swimming and flying animals. As nearly everything we know about how animals learn and remember locations in space comes from two-dimensional experiments in the horizontal plane, here we determined whether the use of three-dimensional space by a terrestrial and a flying animal was correlated with memory for a rewarded location. In the cubic mazes in which we trained and tested rats and hummingbirds, rats moved more vertically than horizontally, whereas hummingbirds moved equally in the three dimensions. Consistent with their movement preferences, rats were more accurate in relocating the horizontal component of a rewarded location than they were in the vertical component. Hummingbirds, however, were more accurate in the vertical dimension than they were in the horizontal, a result that cannot be explained by their use of space. Either as a result of evolution or ontogeny, it appears that birds and rats prioritize horizontal versus vertical components differently when they remember three-dimensional space.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, , St Andrews, Fife, UK, School of Biology, University of St Andrews, , St Andrews, Fife, UK, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Lethbridge, , Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada , T1K 3M4.
authors.forename: I Nuri
authors.initials: IN
authors.lastname: Flores-Abreu
authors.forename: T Andrew
authors.initials: TA
authors.lastname: Hurly
authors.forename: James A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Ainge
authors.forename: Susan D
authors.initials: SD
authors.lastname: Healy
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001717:Birds / Q000502:physiology*; D008124:Locomotion; D008297:Male; D051381:Rats / Q000502:physiology*; D012201:Reward; D013028:Space Perception; D065852:Spatial Memory
keywords: hummingbirds; locomotory style; rats; spatial cognition; three-dimensional navigation
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