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Scent counter-marking is a wide-spread phenomenon among mammals that is not well understood. Using a habituation paradigm, it was found that male golden hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus) exposed to partially overlapping scents of 2 females behaved on test trials as if they remembered the top scent but not the bottom scent. If the 2 females' scents did not overlap during exposure trials, males remembered both of them. Thus, if 2 individual scents partially overlap, hamsters (a) perceive which of the 2 scents was deposited most recently and (b) either remember the top scent and forget the bottom scent or attach greater significance to the top scent. These results indicate the existence of specialized perceptual and cognitive or motivational mechanisms that are used for interpretation and response to complex arrays of social odors.
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Wilcox et al. (1995) studied this question.
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