Many animals restrict their movements to a characteristic home range. This constrained pattern of 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 definitive 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. We parametrize a mechanistic model of spatial transitions using experimental data to quantify the cognitive processes underlying animal foraging behavior and to predict how individuals respond to resource heterogeneity in space and time. We demonstrate that roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) rely on memory, not perception, to track the spatiotemporal dynamics of resources within their home range. Roe deer foraging decisions were primarily based on recent experience (half-lives of 0.9 and 5.6 d for attribute and spatial memory, respectively), enabling them to adapt to sudden changes in resource availability. The proposed memory-based model was able to both quantify the cognitive processes underlying roe deer behavior and accurately predict how they shifted resource use during the experiment. Our study highlights the fact that animal foraging decisions are based on incomplete information on the locations of available resources, a factor that is critical to developing accurate predictions of animal spatial behavior but is typically not accounted for in analyses of animal movement in the wild.

许多动物将它们的活动限制在一个典型的家庭范围内。这种受限的空间使用模式被认为是由于记住异构分布资源的位置和质量的觅食优势所致。然而，由于感官知觉的混杂影响，记忆在家庭范围运动行为中的作用在野外缺乏明确的证据。在这里，我们分析了大型哺乳动物在野外资源操作实验中的觅食决定，该实验旨在解开记忆和感知的影响。我们使用实验数据对空间转变的机械模型进行参数化，以量化动物觅食行为背后的认知过程，并预测个体如何对空间和时间的资源异质性做出反应。我们证明狍（Capreolus capreolus ) 依靠记忆而不是感知来跟踪其栖息地范围内资源的时空动态。狍的觅食决定主要基于最近的经验（属性和空间记忆的半衰期分别为 0.9 和 5.6 d），使它们能够适应资源可用性的突然变化。提出的基于记忆的模型能够量化狍行为背后的认知过程，并准确预测它们在实验期间如何改变资源使用。我们的研究强调了这样一个事实，即动物觅食决策基于可用资源位置的不完整信息，这一因素对于准确预测动物空间行为至关重要，但通常不会在野外动物运动分析中考虑在内。