How animals remember past events has recently received a lot of attention, asresearchers search for an animal model of episodic memory, the system used by humansto remember their pasts and imagine the future. It has now been repeatedlydemonstrated that animals can remember what they did where and when, although howsimilar these memories might be to episodic memory remains controversial. Anotherbroader point highlighted by this research is the variety of different ways an event’slocation can be specified in time, and how little we know of how animals in the realworld organise their behaviour in time.In this thesis I had two aims: to expand our understanding of the timing systemsused by a free-living animal to organise its behaviour and, to look for novel ways ofassessing the similarities and differences between animal and human memory. To thisend, I investigated the timing abilities of free-living rufous hummingbirds Selasphorusrufus, in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, Canada. In particular, I looked at the cuesbirds use to learn floral refill schedules, the types of temporal rules birds could learn, and the relationships between their memories for What, Where, and When. I alsoadapted a test used to study bird memory for use with human participants.Together, the studies presented in this thesis suggest two potentially usefulfuture avenues for research into human episodic memory: investigating whether animalmemory is subject to similar distortions to human memory, and looking at humanmemory under similar situations to those used to test animals. This research alsohighlights the variety of temporal systems hummingbirds can use to guide theirbehaviour, and points to the study of timing as a potentially fruitful arena forinvestigating how an animal’s cognitive abilities can be predicted by its environment.
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Timing and episodic-like memory in the rufous hummingbird
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