University of St Andrews

The School of Psychology and Neuroscience is hosting a seminar presented by Dr Jonathan Crystal from the University of Indiana on ‘Animal Models of Episodic Memory’.

People retrieve episodic memories about specific earlier events that happened to them. Accordingly, researchers have sought to evaluate the hypothesis that nonhumans retrieve episodic memories. The central hypothesis of an animal model of episodic memory is that, at the moment of a memory assessment, the animal retrieves a memory of a specific earlier event.

This hypothesis was tested by ruling out non-episodic memory hypotheses. A range of approaches were developed to provide working models to evaluate elements of episodic memory in animals.

These approaches include: what-where-when memory (Zhou & Crystal 2009, PNAS); source memory (Crystal, Alford, Zhou & Hohmann 2013, Current Biology); binding of episodic memories (Crystal & Smith 2014, Current Biology); multiple item-in-context memories (Panoz-Brown et al., 2016, Current Biology); replay of episodic memories (Panoz-Brown et al., 2018, Current Biology); and answering unexpected questions after incidental encoding (Zhou, Hohmann & Crystal 2012, Current Biology). In each approach, evidence for episodic memory comes from studies in which judgments of familiarity cannot produce accurate choices in memory assessments. These approaches may be used to explore the evolution of memory.

The seminar will be held in the Old Library in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience.