Many animals restrict their movements to a characteristic home range. This pattern of constrained space-use is thought to result from the foraging benefits of memorizing the locations and quality of heterogeneously distributed resources. However, due to the confounding effects of sensory perception, the role of memory in home range movement behavior lacks unequivocal evidence in the wild. Here, we analyze the foraging decisions of a large mammal during a field resource manipulation experiment designed to disentangle the effects of memory and perception. Using a cognitive movement model, we demonstrate that roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) rely on memory, not perception, to track the spatio-temporal dynamics of resources within their home range. Our findings show a memory-based spatial transition model parametrized with experimental data can successfully be used to quantify cognitive processes and to predict how animals respond to resource heterogeneity in space and time.

中文翻译：

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大型野生哺乳动物中基于记忆的觅食决策的实验证据

许多动物都将其活动限制在一个特定的范围内。人们认为这种限制空间使用的模式是由于记住异类分布资源的位置和质量的觅食优势而产生的。然而，由于感觉知觉的混杂作用，在野外运动中记忆在家庭运动行为中的作用缺乏明确的证据。在这里，我们分析了野外资源操纵实验期间大型哺乳动物的觅食决策，该实验旨在消除记忆和知觉的影响。使用认知运动模型，我们证明了ro（Capreolus capreolus）依靠记忆而不是感知来追踪家园范围内资源的时空动态。