Summary: Jays exhibit episodic memory, a type of memory previously thought to be unique to humans, a new study has found. The birds were able to remember incidental details of past events, such as the visual characteristics of the cups used in the food-hiding experiment.
This finding suggests that episodic memory may not be unique to humans and may help jays locate food supplies.
Key facts:
- Jays exhibit episodic memory, recalling random details of past events.
- This ability is similar to “mental time travel” in humans, allowing us to consciously reinterpret past experiences.
- Episodic memory may help jays locate food supplies.
Source: PLOS
According to a study published May 15, 2024 in an open access journal, jays can remember random details of past events, which is typical of episodic memory in humans PLANE ONE by James Davies of the University of Cambridge, UK, and colleagues.
When remembering events, people have the ability to “mental time travel,” consciously re-thinking past experiences and potentially recalling details that seemed unimportant at the time. Some researchers have suggested that this “episodic memory” is unique to humans.
In this study, Davis and his colleagues conducted a memory experiment to test episodic memory in seven Eurasian jays, birds that are excellent at remembering where food is stored.
In the experiment, birds watched food placed under one cup in a row of four identical cups and then received a reward for choosing the correct cup with the bait.
Over several trials, the birds were taught to identify the correct cup by memorizing its position in a line. During the test, the jays were then given a surprise memory assessment: they watched food placed under one of the cups, all of which now had unique visual characteristics, but then separated from the cups for 10 minutes while the cups were moved and rearranged.
Despite the repositioning of the cups and the added time delay, the birds still correctly identified the decoy cup according to its visual characteristics 70% of the time.
These results suggest that even if the visual differences between the cups were unimportant during training, the birds were able to notice these differences during the test and recall them later, similar to episodic memory in humans.
This study shows that episodic memory can help jays find food stores, and the researchers suggest that future studies could investigate whether the birds can perform similar feats of memory in other non-food situations.
The authors add, “Because jays were able to remember details that had no particular value or significance at the time of memory formation, this suggests that they are able to record, recall, and access incidental information within a remembered event. It is a capacity that characterizes a type of human memory by which we mentally “relive” past events (or episodes), known as ‘episodic’ memory’.
This is the memory research news
Author: Hanna Abdullah
Source: PLOS
Contacts: Hannah Abdullah – PLOS
image: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Open access.
“Jays (Garrulus glandarius) exhibit episodic memory through incidental encoding of information” by James R. Davis et al. PLOS One
Abstract
Jays (Garrulus glandarius) exhibit episodic memory through incidental information encoding
Episodic memory describes the conscious reinterpretation of our memories and is often considered a uniquely human ability.
Because these phenomenological components are included in its definition, there are serious problems in investigating the presence of episodic memory in nonhuman animals.
What is important, however, is that when we as humans recall a particular experience, we may recall details of that experience that were irrelevant to our needs, thoughts, or desires at the time.
This “incidental” information, however, is automatically encoded as part of memory and subsequently recalled as part of a coherent representation of the event.
Contingent encoding and the surprise question paradigm represent this characteristic feature of human episodic memory and can be used to investigate memory in animals other than humans.
However, without evidence of an associated phenomenology during recall, this type of memory is called “episodic-how memory’.
Using this approach, we tested seven Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) on their ability to use incidental visual information (associated with observed experimenter-generated “caches”) to solve an unexpected memory test.
The birds’ scores exceeded chance, suggesting that jays can encode, store, recall, and access incidental visual information within a remembered event, an ability indicative of episodic memory in humans.