Behavioural brain research
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Review Comparative Study
Ten years of research into avian models of episodic-like memory and its implications for developmental and comparative cognition.
Episodic memory refers to the ability to remember specific personal events from the past. Ever since Tulving first made the distinction between episodic memory and other forms of declarative memory in 1972, most cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have assumed that episodic recall is unique to humans. ⋯ Here we shall first review the avian studies of what-where-when memory, namely in the Western scrub-jays, magpies, black-capped chickadees and pigeons; we shall then present an alternative approach to studying episodic-like memory also tested in pigeons. In the second and third section we want to draw attention to topics where we believe the bird model could prove highly valuable, namely studying development of episodic-memory in pre-verbal children, and the evolution and ontogeny of brain areas subserving episodic(-like) memory.
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In recent years there has been significant debate about whether there is a single medial temporal lobe memory system or dissociable systems for episodic and other types of declarative memory. In addition there has been a similar debate over the dissociability of recollection and familiarity based processes in recognition memory. ⋯ Similarly we review behavioural evidence for a dissociation in a task of episodic memory in rats where animals with lesions of the fornix are only impaired at recollection of the episodic memory, not recognition within the same trial. This work, then, supports recent models of dissociable neural systems within the medial temporal lobe but also raises questions for future investigation about the interactions of these medial temporal lobe memory systems with other structures.