Learning in Spiders

After the spider, Zygiella x-notata Cl. has been enticed toleave the retreat and catch a fly in a web turned upside-down,it takes a relatively long time to return to the retreat. Thereturn-time is divided into periods of active searching andmotionlessness. Several factors have been found to shorten significantlythe searching and motionless time; among them are youth of theanimals, small number of webs previously built, the positionof the web before and between experiments, and repetition oftrials at certain time intervals. The observed phenomenon andvariations in time are explained in terms of current conceptsof memory function and information processing.