麻豆传媒

About me

I am interested in how animals acquire and use information in their environments and how these processes shape foraging decisions. To study this, I use techniques and concepts from ethology, psychology, and computer science, and work with animals both in the lab and in their natural environments. In recent years I have also become interested in how ideas spread in science, and how these dynamics influence the kinds of hypotheses we test when studying animal behaviour and cognition.

History

I received a PhD in Biology from the University of St Andrews in 2016, where I studied spatial memory in wild hummingbirds. Following this, I worked a number of part-time jobs at St Andrews for 3 years, including teaching undergraduate Biology, working as the editorial assistant for the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, and working as an Insect technician. In 2019 I moved to the University of Stirling in 2019 to investigate buzz-pollination in bumblebees, then returned to St Andrews in 2022 as a fixed term lecturer in Animal Cognition before joining the University of Lincoln as a Lecturer in Animal Behaviour and Welfare in 2023. Finally I joined the 麻豆传媒 in 2024 as a Lecturer in Psychology.

Qualifications

2011-2016      University of St Andrews PhD in Biology: Small-scale navigation by wild hummingbirds

2009-2010      University of Exeter MSc Animal Behaviour with Distinction

2005-2009      Oxford University BA Biological Sciences. 2.1

Search as a Window into Animal Cognition

Many animals need to search. For food, for mates, even for homes. Search itself occurs at a wide range of scales, from a chicken searching a small patch of ground for insects, to seabirds searching across oceans to find resources. I am interested in how the cognitive processes underlying search, including learning, memory and attention, interact with the movements that animals make as they search. Movements may be influenced by what animals have learned in the past, but moving also exposes animals to updated information, resulting in a cycle of perceiving and acting on information. We use combinations of behavioural experiments and computational tracking in both the lab and field to examine how these species use information to adaptively shape how they search.

Small-Scale Navigation in Birds

Birds are a classic model in navigation research, with epic migratory journeys covering thousands of kilometres. But navigation is also required closer to home. Birds need to find their nest, find reliable sources of food, and avoid dangerous locations. Navigation at these smaller scales is actually much less understood than the navigation processes used by birds during long migrations. To examine navigation at smaller scales I work with hummingbirds in the wild, and chickens in the lab, using tracking and behavioural experiments to pull apart the uses of different kinds of navigational information. To do this, I often take inspiration from studies of insect navigation which has been wildly successful over the last several decades but is rarely referenced by researchers in vertebrate navigation. While birds will not navigate the same way as insects, the approaches taken by insect researchers (including examining the details of behaviour, estimating the information available to animals, and how this information is affected by movements) offers a novel window into this underexamined aspect of avian navigation.

Spatial Cognition in Hummingbirds

For the past 10 years I have studied small-scale navigation in Rufous hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus). To forage effectively, these little birds remember individual flowers within the territory. The hummingbirds do not remember flowers in terms of their physical appearance, but instead remember the spatial location of a flower within the territory. Very little is known about how the hummingbirds remember the spatial location of a flower, the cues they use, and how this relates to navigation in other animals. Continuing work I started during my PhD, I have examined how hummingbirds use environmental information, particularly visual cues, to return to the location of a flower. Working in the Canadian Rockies over the summer, we use field experiments to tease apart what the hummingbirds remembered about flower locations. In recent years we have used visual tracking software to extract and analyse flight paths, and model the potential visual information available to the birds using cutting-edge photogrammetry tools. These methods allow us to analyse the behaviour and visual cues used by hummingbirds in unprecedented detail.

Module leader: PSY1015 - Principles of Evolution, Genetics and Behavioural Development

Other teaching: PSY1018 - Psychological Enquiry

PSY3097 - Empirical Project

PSY8082 - Research Skills for Psychological Research in Clinical Settings

• Articles

  • Taylor CH, Watson DJG, Gilbert F, Pritchard DJ, Skelhorn J, Reader T. Unlearned responses of chicks, Gallus gallus domesticus, towards aposematic insect-like stimuli. Animal Behaviour 2026, 233, 123479.
  • Pritchard DJ, Hurly TA, Photopoulou T, Healy SD. Applying movement ecology models to comparative cognition experiments: a field test in hummingbirds. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 2025, 292(2051), 20250717.
  • Sugasawa S, Pritchard DJ. . Ecological Research 2022, 37(3), 316-324.
  • Healy SD, Sugasawa S, Tello-Ramos MC, Pritchard DJ. . Current Opinion in Behavioural Sciences 2022, 44, 101106.
  • Pritchard, DJ, Vallejo-Marin, M. Floral vibrations by buzz-pollinating bees achieve higher frequency, velocity and acceleration than flight and defence vibrations. Journal of Experimental Biology 2020, 223(11), jeb220541.
  • Pritchard, DJ, Vallejo-Marin, M. Buzz Pollination. Current Biology 2020, 30(15), R858-R860.
  • Pritchard, DJ, Hurly, TA, Healy, SD. Wild hummingbirds require a consistent view of landmarks to pinpoint a goal location. Animal Behaviour 2018, 137, 83-94.
  • Pritchard, DJ, Healy, SD. Taking an insect-inspired approach to bird navigation. Learning & Behavior 2018, 46(1), 7-22.
  • Pritchard, DJ. Situated Cognition and the Function of Behavior. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews 2018, 13, 35-39.
  • Pritchard, DJ, Tello Ramos, MC, Muth, F, Healy, SD. Treating hummingbirds as feathered bees: a case of ethological cross-pollination. Biology Letters 2017, 13(12), 20170610.
  • Pritchard, DJ, Scott, RD, Healy, SD, Hurly, TA. Wild rufous hummingbirds use local landmarks to return to rewarded locations. Behavioural Processes 2016, 122, 59-66.
  • Pritchard, DJ, Hurly, TA, Tello Ramos, MC, Healy, SD. WHY STUDY COGNITION IN THE WILD (AND HOW TO TEST IT)?. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 2016, 105(1), 41-55.
  • Pritchard, DJ, Hurly, TA, Healy, SD. Effects of landmark distance and stability on accuracy of reward relocation. Animal Cognition 2015, 18(6), 1285-1297.
  • Hornsby, MAW, Hurly, TA, Hamilton, CE, Pritchard, DJ, Healy, SD. Wild, free-living rufous hummingbirds do not use geometric cues in a spatial task. Behavioural Processes 2014, 108, 138-141.

• Book Chapters

  • Wirth S, Cheng K, Fleischman P, Lohmann KJ, Milford M, Mouritsen H, Pritchard DJ, Robira B, Ulanovsky N, Wan K. Universal Principles of Navigation across Species and Spatial Scales. In: Newcombe, NS; Cheng, K, ed. Challenges in Navigation Research: Mapping New Directions. 2026, pp.63-136.
  • Pritchard DJ. Taking a Functional Look at Bird Navigation. In: Newcombe, NS; Cheng, K, ed. Challenges in Navigation Research: Mapping New Directions. 2026, pp.11-32.