abstract: An emerging literature on the relation between memory and importance has shown that people are able to selectively remember information that is more, relative to less important. Researchers in this field have operationalized importance by assigning value to the different information that participants are asked to study and remember. In the present investigation I developed two experiments, using a slightly altered value-directed-remembering (VDR) paradigm, to investigate whether and how value modifies the dynamics of memory organization and search. Moreover, I asked participants to perform a surprise final free recall task in order to examine the effects of value in the recall dynamics of final free recall. In Experiment 1, I compared the recall dynamics of delayed and final free recall between a control and a value condition, in the latter of which numbers appeared next to words, in random order, denoting the value of remembering each word during recall. In Experiment 2, I manipulated the order of presentation of the values by adding an ascending and a descending condition where values were presented in either an ascending or a descending order, respectively. Overall, my results indicated that value affected several measures of delayed and final free recall, without, in most cases, taking away the serial position effects on those same measures. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Psychology 2015

Dans un monde changeant et incertain, pouvoir moduler sa réponse phénotypique selon les conditions locales représente un avantage adaptatif majeur. Cette aptitude passe par la récolte d’informations, et plus précisément, dans le cadre de la plasticité du comportement, par la combinaison d’informations passées et présentes. Ceci est rendu possible par l’apprentissage et la mémoire, qui permettent aux animaux de stocker l’information en vue d’une utilisation ultérieure. Cette thèse a pour vocation de renforcer les liens entre écologie comportementale et cognition. Tout d’abord, nous nous sommes penchés sur deux questions propres à l’utilisation d’information passée. (i) Quelle importance est accordée aux informations anciennes face aux récentes ? (ii) En cas de redondance, toutes les informations récoltées sont-elles conservées ? Nous avons montré que (i) l’hyménoptère parasitoïde Venturia canescens accorde un poids égal à l’information issue de l’exploitation de parcelles successives d’hôtes. (ii) Parmi trois sources possibles d’information passée, une seule est utilisée. Dans un second temps, nous avons testé l’hypothèse selon laquelle apprentissage et mémoire ont évolué en réponse au milieu de vie. Nous avons mené une étude comparative sur des V. canescens arrhénotoques et thélytoques vivant dans des habitats contrastés. Les résultats obtenus lors d’un conditionnement olfactif concordent en partie avec nos prédictions, renforçant l’idée d’un lien entre distribution de la ressource et apprentissage. Du point de vue théorique, la question de la valeur adaptative de la durée des différentes phases de mémoire n’a jusqu’ici pas été traitée. Un modèle de simulation est proposé pour commencer à combler cette lacune / In an uncertain and changing world, being able to shape its phenotype according to the current environmental conditions should provide individuals with a major fitness benefit. This depends on information gathering. In the context of behavioural plasticity, it more specifically implies to combine past and current information pieces. Past information use happens through learning and memory, that enables animals to store information in memory for a subsequent decision making. This thesis aims at strengthen the links between behavioural ecology and cognition. First, we tackled two questions specific to past information use. (i) Which weight is given to an older information piece in front of a more recent one? (ii) If several redundant information pieces are gathered, are they all stored? We showed that (i) the parasitoid wasp Venturia canescens seems, at the time scaled we worked with, to weight equally information pieces coming from older and more recent host patches successively foraged. (ii) Among three possible past information sources, only one is stored for a later use. Second, we tested the hypothesis that learning and memory evolved in response to ecological constraints. We conducted a comparative study with arrhenotokous and thelytokous V. canescens thriving in different habitats. Results obtained through olfactory conditioning partially matched our initial predictions; this support the idea of a link between resource distribution and learning features. From the theoretical point of view, the question of the adaptive significance of the length of memory phases has not been tackled yet. Here is shown a model, as a first attempt to fill this gap