The Memory of Animals: From the Costa Novel Award-winning author of Unsettled Ground

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A memorable meditation on how the human struggle to survive in captivity is not so different than that of our animal kin.

The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller | The Saturday Paper The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller | The Saturday Paper

In the laboratory, animals push levers, pull strings, dig for food, swim in water mazes, or respond to images on computer screens to get information for discrimination, attention, memory, and categorization experiments. The radial arm maze is used to test memory for spatial location and to determine the mental processes by which location is determined. Such a map-like representation is thought to be used, for example, when an animal goes directly from one food source to another even though its previous experience has involved only travel between each source and home.Salamanders given a choice between two displays with differing amounts of fruit flies, used as a food reward, reliably choose the display with more flies, as shown in a particular experiment. Animals trained to discriminate between two stimuli, say black versus white, can be said to attend to the "brightness dimension," but this says little about whether this dimension is selected in preference to others. Probably the most explicit dismissal of the idea that mental processes control behavior was the radical behaviorism of Skinner.

The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller review – apocalypse The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller review – apocalypse

With the peephole open, the ravens guarded their caches against discovery when they could hear dominants in the adjacent room, even when the dominant's sounds were playbacks of recordings. Thorndike [157] (1874–1949) placed hungry cats and dogs in enclosures "from which they could escape by some simple act, such as pulling at a loop of cord". There’s also the altogether more surreal matter of why she is writing letters to an octopus she once cared for in an aquarium.

There are no staff left at Vaccine BioPharm and only four of the other volunteers remain: Leon, Yahiko, Rachel and Piper.

The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller review – trapped in

Bipedal locomotion in Octopus vulgaris: A complementary observation and some preliminary considerations". A former marine biologist struggles to survive a global pandemic while reconciling with her difficult past. Crows understand water displacement at the level of a small child: Show causal understanding of a 5- to 7-year-old child".

The nurse, whose head is level with my chest, is wearing the ubiquitous hospital top and loose trousers; the same as the nurses wore in the clinic in the hills above Big Sur and in the hospital in Athens. The time at which the rat presses most on these test trials is taken to be its estimate of the payoff time. American black bears demonstrated quantity differentiation abilities in a task with a computer screen. Abandoned and alone, Neffy and four other volunteers are left bickering over their quickly diminishing stash of ready meals and wringing their hands.

The Memory of Animals | Aardvark Book Club The Memory of Animals | Aardvark Book Club

As noted above, the function of attention is to select information that is of special use to the animal. Part of me worried I’d made another bad decision but the more my phone buzzed the more determined I became.For instance, to understand that she can grab her paralyzed prey by a leg instead of an antenna is utterly beyond the powers of a sand wasp.