Episodic-like memory in common bottlenose dolphins

Bottlenose dolphins are sensitive to human attentional features, including eye functionality

“…The dolphins' ability to successfully attend to eye cues is particularly interesting, considering the inconsistent evidence for this ability in chimpanzees and other non-human primates, as well as the distinct difference in eye placement between humans and dolphins. Therefore, these results, alongside other evidence 21,[32][33][34][35][36][37][39][40][41][42][43][44] , raise the possibility that bottlenose dolphins possess complex social cognitive abilities.…”

“…Each dolphin that participated in this study was born and raised in captivity. The dolphins had previously participated in other research using the same commands 36 . Zoomarine trains their dolphins to perform different behaviours for various reasons, including medical care and zoo performances, as in common in zoological settings 66 .…”

“…Furthermore, dolphins engage in elaborate cooperative hunting strategies 28 , with division of labour and role specialisation 29 , and spread foraging strategies via social networks to form diverse cultures 30,31 . Living within this convoluted social environment may demand a suite of socio-cognitive skills, such as multi-modal individual recognition 32,33 , selective social learning 34 , life-long social memory 35 , episodic-like memory in a social context 36 , and precise behavioural synchronization 37 , as well as abilities that depend on social attention (paying attention to the attention of others) 38 . These include the ability to imitate 21 , the understanding and production of indicative pointing [39][40][41] , and the capacity to understand the focus of another individual's gaze [42][43][44][45] .…”

Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) show episodic-like memory through the incidental encoding of information

“…It must be said, however, that whilst this study does provide convincing evidence to suggest that Eurasian jays can encode, retain, recall, and access incidental visual information within the remembered event, this ability may be restricted to information associated with food caching, and thus does not necessarily represent the domain-general flexibility typical of human episodic memory [ 59 ]. As to our knowledge all research investigating episodic-like memory in corvids relies on some form of food caching paradigm, future studies should develop this work by assessing these birds’ ability to recall other information, such as social cues, as comparable studies have done with other taxa [ 23 ].…”

“…Whilst many psychologists believe episodic memory (and thus mental time travel) to be a uniquely human ability [3,[7][8][9][10], arguing that although animals have a complex semantic knowledge of their environment they cannot consciously recall and re-experience past events as we can [8], it is theoretically impossible to establish if non-humans have episodic memory using this definition. Consequently, researchers have instead focused on behavioural paradigms that represent the characteristics of human episodic memory in non-human animals [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. However, in the absence of evidence for a subjective conscious experience during recall, this type of memory is termed 'episodic-like memory' [11].…”