New research shows that Eurasian jays have a memory similar to human episodic memory, allowing them to recall random details about past events, which can help them locate their food.
One study found that jays remember random details, which is similar to episodic memory in humans.
According to a study recently published in an open access journal VERY ONE, Eurasian jays have the ability to remember random details of past events, a trait indicative of episodic memory in humans. This research was conducted by James Davies and his team from the University of Cambridge in Great Britain.
When remembering events, people have the ability to “mentally time travel,” consciously reimagining past experiences and potentially remembering details that seemed unimportant at the time. Some researchers have suggested that this “episodic memory” is unique to humans. In this study, Davies and colleagues conducted a memory experiment to test episodic memory in seven Eurasian jays, birds that excel at remembering the location of stored food.
Jaylo the Jay watches as food is placed in a cup with a blue string during the encoding phase. Credit: James Davies, CC-BY 4.0
During the experiment, the birds watched as food was placed under a cup in a row of four identical cups and were then rewarded for correctly choosing the cup containing the bait. Over several trials, the birds were trained to identify the correct cup by remembering its position in the array. Then, during the test, the jays were subjected to an unexpected assessment of their memory: they saw food placed under one of the cups, which now all had unique visual characteristics, but were then separated from the cups for 10 minutes while the cups were moved and rearranged. Despite changing the position of the cups and the additional delay, the birds still correctly identified the cup with the bait based on its visual characteristics 70% of the time.
Implications of the study
These results suggest that although the visual differences between the cups were not significant during training, the birds were able to notice these differences during testing and remember them later, similar to episodic memory in humans. This study shows that episodic memory could help jays find food reserves, and the researchers suggest that future studies could determine whether the birds can perform similar feats of memory in other non-food scenarios.
The authors add: “Because jays were able to recall details that had no particular value or relevance at the time the memory was created, this suggests that they are able to record, remember and access incidental information within a stored event. This is an ability that characterizes a type of human memory through which we mentally “relive” past events (or episodes), known as “episodic” memory.