Graphical AbstractHighlights d Food-caching chickadees rely on spatial cognition to recover caches d Adult chickadees perform better than juveniles in spatial cognitive tasks d Performance in spatial cognitive tasks does not differ between seasons d Variation in spatial cognitive abilities is associated with differences in survival

Cognition is one of the mechanisms underlying behavioral flexibility, but flexibility of cognition itself may vary as a result of trade-offs between the ability to learn new information and the ability to retain old memories. How and when cognitive flexibility is constrained by this trade-off remains poorly understood. We investigated cognitive flexibility in wild food-caching mountain chickadees in the field at different elevations experiencing different levels of environmental harshness, using a spatial learning and memory reversal paradigm. There were no significant differences in sampling strategies between elevations, but high elevation chickadees performed worse than low elevation chickadees on the reversal task, indicating lower cognitive flexibility. Compared to the initial learning task, low elevation chickadees improved their performance during the reversal task, while high elevation chickadees performed worse. High elevation birds inspected previously rewarding locations more frequently than other locations, suggesting that reduced cognitive flexibility is associated with proactive interference. Considering that high elevation chickadees cache more food and are likely more dependent on these caches than their conspecifics from low elevation, and that chickadees from both elevations use similar sampling strategies, our findings suggest that stronger memories of more caches might interfere with acquisition and retention of new memories. Overall, our results suggest that predictably harsh environments might favor stronger memories at the expense of decreased cognitive flexibility, which is likely driven by increased proactive interference.

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