Episodic memory: what can animals remember about their past?

Griffiths, D. P.; Dickinson, Anthony; Clayton, Nicola S.

doi:10.1016/s1364-6613(98)01272-8

Cited by 183 publications

(132 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…This is not a hypothetical example. Griffiths, Dickinson, and Clayton (1999;also see de Kort, Dickinson, & Clayton, 2005) trained jays in a task in which the jays cached either worms or peanuts in two separate sand-filled trays. The birds were given the opportunity to learn that the worms decayed and were inedible 124 hours after caching, but that the peanuts were still edible.…”

Section: Temporal Knowledge In the Context Of Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal knowledge and autobiographical memory: an evolutionary perspective

Skowronski

Sedikides

2012

Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology

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Temporal Knowledge and Autobiographical Memory ---2 Temporal Knowledge and Autobiographical Memory: An Evolutionary PerspectiveOne characteristic of humans is that they have a sense of self. Exactly what does this mean? Examination of research and theory exploring the psychology of the self suggests that it has at least three important aspects.The first of these aspects is representation: The memory system contains mental structures that store and organize different kinds of self-relevant knowledge. Some of this knowledge is affective, reflecting the feelings that people have about themselves. Also, some of the knowledge is behavioral, reflecting mental procedures that contain memories of how to carry out various routines (e.g., riding a bicycle). This procedural information is often stored in non-verbal form. In addition, some of the knowledge reflects episodic memories of specific life events. These memories contain perceptual details of events, as well as information about event contexts (e.g., the time at which an event occurred).Furthermore, some of the knowledge is semantic, reflecting memories of self-judgments or the judgments that others have made of, and conveyed to, the self. These selfjudgments can be global (e.g., I am an uncoordinated person) or situationally constrained (e.g., I am good at cooking Indian food). These semantic representations can also contain memories of meta-cognitions (e.g., ideas about how others perceive one's behavior), information referring to dyadic relationships, information about one's position within a group, and information about intragroup dynamics and intergroup relations. Moreover, these semantic representations might contain information about how one compares to others or to the groups to which one belongs. Such information highlights those attributes that make one unique and distinct from attributes that characterize others (personal self), Temporal Knowledge and Autobiographical Memory ---3 those attributes that are shared with others with whom one has interpersonal relations (relational self), or those attributes that one shares with the groups to which one belongs (collective self ) (Sedikides & Brewer, 2001).The second attribute of the human self is that it maintains an executive function, regulating an individual's relation with the social and physical environment. Three classes of motives likely guide this capacity (Sedikides & Skowronski, 2000;Sedikides, Skowronski, & Gaertner, 2004): valuation (i.e., protecting and enhancing the self), learning (i.e., pursing a relatively accurate image of the self, improving skills and abilities), and homeostasis (i.e., seeking and endorsing information that is consistent with the self).The third attribute of the self is reflexivity. This term can be defined as the organism's ability to depict itself in its ongoing relation with other objects. Reflexivity is manifested in the interplay between the representational and executive capacities. For example, reflexivity allows the organism to alter long-term goals and render them...

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Section: Temporal Knowledge In the Context Of Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal knowledge and autobiographical memory: an evolutionary perspective

Skowronski

Sedikides

2012

Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology

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“…In fact, learning takes place so rapidly that one wonders if the animal has to learn any`rule' for solution at all. Gri¤ths et al (1999) argue that this task could also be solved by familiarityö the animal has only to approach the set of cues that are most familiar, these being the ones associated with the last position in which the platform has been placed. This Episodic-like memory in animals R. G. M. Morris 1457 objection cannot be de¢nitively dismissed, but I would make two points:…”

Section: In What Kinds Of Animal Learning and Memory Tasks Might An Ementioning

confidence: 99%

Episodic-like memory in animals: psychological criteria, neural mechanisms and the value of episodic-like tasks to investigate animal models of neurodegenerative disease

Morris¹

2002

Episodic Memory: New Directions in Research

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The question of whether any non-human species displays episodic memory is controversial. Associative accounts of animal learning recognize that behaviour can change in response to single events but this does not imply that animals need or are later able to recall representations of unique events at a di¡erent time and place. The lack of language is also relevant, being the usual medium for communicating about the world, but whether it is critical for the capacity to represent and recall events is a separate matter. One reason for suspecting that certain animals possess an episodic-like memory system is that a variety of learning and memory tasks have been developed that, even though they do not meet the strict criteria required for episodic memory, have an`episodic-like' character. These include certain one-trial learning tasks, scene-speci¢c discrimination learning, multiple reversal learning, delayed matching and nonmatching tasks and, most recently, tasks demanding recollection of`what, where and when' an event happened. Another reason is that the neuronal architecture of brain areas thought to be involved in episodic memory (including the hippocampal formation) are substantially similar in mammals and, arguably, all vertebrates. Third, our developing understanding of activity-dependent synaptic plasticity (which is a candidate neuronal mechanism for encoding memory traces) suggests that its expression re£ects certain physiological characteristics that are ideal components of a neuronal episodic memory system. These include the apparently digital character of synaptic change at individual terminals and the variable persistence of potentiation accounted for by the synaptic tag hypothesis. A further value of studying episodic-like memory in animals is the opportunity it a¡ords to model certain kinds of neurodegenerative disease that, in humans, a¡ect episodic memory. An example is recent work on a transgenic mouse that over-expresses a mutation of human amyloid precursor protein (APP) that occurs in familial Alzheimer's disease, under the control of platelet derived (PD) growth factor promoter (the PDAPP mouse). A striking age-and amyloid plaque-related de¢cit is seen using a task in which the mice have to keep changing their memory representation of the world rather than learn a single fact.

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“…Most researchers distinguish episodic memory from the mere ''episodic-like'' or what-where-when (WWW) memory possessed by some animals (Clayton, Griffiths, Emery, & Dickinson, 2001;Griffiths, Dickinson, & Clayton, 1999;Roberts & Feeney, 2009;Suddendorf, 2003;Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007). In contrast to WWW memory, true episodic memory involves a distinctive phenomenology, autonoetic consciousness-the agent does not merely retrieve a representation of the event, but again has the subjective sense of experiencing it (Markowitsch & Staniloiu, 2010;Nyberg, Kim, Habib, Levine, & Tulving, 2010;Tulving, 1983;Vandekerckhove & Panksepp, 2009).…”

Section: Mental Time Travelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is external memory memory? Biological memory and extended mind

Michaelian

2012

Consciousness and Cognition

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a b s t r a c t Clark and Chalmers (1998) claim that an external resource satisfying the following criteria counts as a memory: (1) the agent has constant access to the resource; (2) the information in the resource is directly available; (3) retrieved information is automatically endorsed; (4) information is stored as a consequence of past endorsement. Research on forgetting and metamemory shows that most of these criteria are not satisfied by biological memory, so they are inadequate. More psychologically realistic criteria generate a similar classification of standard putative external memories, but the criteria still do not capture the function of memory. An adequate account of memory function, compatible with its evolution and its roles in prospection and imagination, suggests that external memory performs a function not performed by biological memory systems. External memory is thus not memory. This has implications for: extended mind theorizing, ecological validity of memory research, the causal theory of memory.

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Episodic memory: what can animals remember about their past?

Cited by 183 publications

References 30 publications

Temporal knowledge and autobiographical memory: an evolutionary perspective

Temporal knowledge and autobiographical memory: an evolutionary perspective

Episodic-like memory in animals: psychological criteria, neural mechanisms and the value of episodic-like tasks to investigate animal models of neurodegenerative disease

Is external memory memory? Biological memory and extended mind

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