Multiple cache recovery task cannot determine memory mechanisms.

Abstract

A recent paper Smulders et al., (2023) analyzed results of an experiment in which food-caching coal tits needed to relocate and recover multiple previously made food caches and argued that food caching parids use familiarity and not recollection memory when recovering food caches. The memory task involving recovery of multiple caches in the same trial, however, cannot discriminate between these two memory mechanisms because small birds do not need to recover multiple caches to eat during a single trial. They satiate quickly after eating just the first recovered food cache and quickly lose motivation to search for caches, and can be expected to start exploring noncache locations rather than recovering the remaining caches, which would result in inaccurate memory measurements.