Some birds may have the human ability to reimagine memories, new study

In the peer-reviewed, open access journal, PLOS ONE, a new research article, “Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) show episodic-like memory through the incidental encoding of information,” indicates that some birds may be able to use “mental time travel,” a capability thought to be unique to humans. Mental time travel is the capacity to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past, aka, episodic memory, as well as to imagine possible scenarios in the future, aka, episodic foresight or episodic future thinking.

The abstract follows.

Abstract

Episodic memory describes the conscious reimagining of our memories and is often considered to be a uniquely human ability. As these phenomenological components are embedded within its definition, major issues arise when investigating the presence of episodic memory in non-human animals. Importantly, however, when we as humans recall a specific experience, we may remember details from that experience that were inconsequential to our needs, thoughts, or desires at that time. This ‘incidental’ information is nevertheless encoded automatically as part of the memory and is subsequently recalled within a holistic representation of the event. The incidental encoding and unexpected question paradigm represents this characteristic feature of human episodic memory and can be employed to investigate memory recall in non-human animals. However, without evidence for the associated phenomenology during recall, this type of memory is termed ‘episodic-like memory’. Using this approach, we tested seven Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) on their ability to use incidental visual information (associated with observed experimenter made ‘caches’) to solve an unexpected memory test. The birds performed above chance levels, suggesting that Eurasian jays can encode, retain, recall, and access incidental visual information within a remembered event, which is an ability indicative of episodic memory in humans.