Animal Memory
Animal Memory is how animals store and recall things they have learned before.
A drawer in the kitchen holds small boxes. Each box has a label: a meal name and the spot where it was kept. When you need that meal again, you read the label and go to the right spot. An animal's memory works the same way — it stores what happened, then pulls it up later.
Explaining animal memory by grade level
A mouse runs through a maze for the first time and gets lost a lot. The next day, it finds its way faster. By the third day, it moves through with no wrong turns. The mouse holds a map of the maze in its mind.
Projects that explore animal memory
Mice can store and recall a bad taste for days. You set up two cages with four mice each: on day one, cage one gets food with lithium chloride (a bitter-tasting chemical) while cage two gets plain food. At the end of the day you weigh the leftover food to see how much each group ate. On day two both cages get plain food. On day three, lithium chloride goes back into cage one. If the mice remember the bad taste, they should eat even less than on day one.
Animals show memory by completing the same task faster each time they try it. When hamsters and mice run a maze ten times, both species get faster after every attempt because they remember the paths. Mice are able to learn more quickly than hamsters, showing that different species store and recall spatial information at different speeds.
Animals can also lose a stored response over time. Male bettas flare their fins and gills to warn rival males away — but place a mirror against the tank repeatedly and something changes. You show the mirror, remove it, then show it again after one minute; each presentation counts as one trial. As you repeat trials, the betta stops reacting. The next day you test again to see whether the fish remembers. This reveals two ways animals stop responding: extinction, where the warning fails to work, and habituation, where the fish simply gets used to it.