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1 .This is Scientific American - 60-Second Science. I'm Steve Mirsky.
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2 .We humans sometimes use a memory technique called chunking.
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3 .For example, with phone numbers we usually remember the three-digit chunk and the four-digit chunk.
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4 .Two items instead of seven.
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5 ."Well, the way I think about chunking is it's any short cutting strategy or mnemonic device
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6 .that would allow an animal, be it human or otherwise, to increase their memory capacity and improve recall.
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7 ." Mikel Delgado, an animal behaviorist now at U.C. Davis.
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8 ."And so in the case of the research I was doing in this study,
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9 .I wanted to know if squirrels would basically arrange their nuts in a way that might facilitate either recall of the location
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10 .or recaching and redistribution of those nuts later,
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11 .making it more convenient for them to remember where nuts were stored-
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12 .because they stored nuts of a similar type or value in similar locations spatially."
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13 .Delgado looked for this spatial chunking among 45 fox squirrels on the campus of U.C. Berkeley, where she got her doctorate in August.
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14 ."So we gave each squirrel 16 nuts...our each of four different types...so the types were almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts and pecans."
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15 ."And so we'd give the squirrel the first nut, they'd go bury it.
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16 .We would follow them from a distance until they had finished caching, or burying it. We recorded the GPS location where they'd buried the nut.
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17 .And then we lured them back to the original location where they received the first nut to give them the second nut.
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18 .And so we did that every single time."
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19 ."And so the other location condition was basically a lot faster and easier
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20 .where we gave the squirrel the first nut, they buried it,
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21 .and then we gave them the second nut right where they buried the first one."
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22 .And when the squirrels got all their nuts from a central location, they spatially chunked them:
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23 ."So they would actually cache nuts that were the same species in distinct areas from nuts of a different species...
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24 .so the take home message I think for me is really that just like physical traits have evolved,
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25 .I believe that cognitive traits have evolved as well.
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26 .And a memory process that's very common in humans, this chunking, is a strategy that works for other species."
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27 .The study is in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
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28 .Why the critters did not spatially chunk when they received nuts in different locations is not clear.
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29 .To do so might have been too energetically costly.
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30 .It's also possible that it's beyond their cognitive capacity-
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31 .although anyone who has tried to squirrel-proof a bird feeder knows that squirrels have a lot of cognitive capacity.
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32 .Thanks for listening the Scientific American - 60-Second Science Science. I'm Steve Mirsky.
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