Commentary: Merging of long-term memories in an insect

Frontiers in Psychology

Gema Martin-Ordas¹ 

关键词: non-human animals;    insects;    episodic memory;    false memories;    memory conjunction errors;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00826

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Imagine that you are asked to remember a list of words (e.g., “inside” and “consult”). At test you have to recognize which words were in the list. Now imagine that one of the words that you have to recognize is “insult.” Was “insult” in the list? If you respond “yes,” you are making a conjunction error (Underwood and Zimmerman, 1973; Reinitz et al., 1992; Kroll et al., 1996); that is, you incorrectly recognize a novel word (insult), which is made up of parts of two previously studied items (“in,” “sult”), as being part of the previously studied word list. This example illustrates that human episodic memory (memory for events, such as the event of learning a word list) is reconstructive and not an accurate representation of previously experienced events (Roediger, 1996; Tulving, 2005). When recalling an event, we often rely on our store of general knowledge to fill in the gaps, or we confuse information from different sources (Schacter, 2001). Thus, errors (e.g., conjunction errors) constitute the main evidence for reconstructive processes in remembering. Understanding episodic memory as an evolved capacity implies investigating other animals besides humans. Over the last two decades comparative psychologists have mainly studied whether non-human animals (henceforth animals) accurately remember what happened, where and when [Clayton and Dickinson, 1998; see Zentall et al. (2008) and Fortin et al. (2004) for other empirical approaches]. However, the reconstructive nature of episodic memory in animals has received much less attention, although some studies have addressed false memories in animals. For example, artificial memories have been induced by targeted neuronal activation in genetically engineered mice (Liu et al., 2012) and flies (Claridge-Chang et al., 2009); and brain damaged rats behave toward novel objects as if they were familiar (McTighe et al., 2010). However, no research has investigated the reconstructive nature of memory in intact animals, which is crucial to understand the normal functioning of their memory systems.

【 授权许可】

CC BY