MCF2L Gives Brand-New Life Into An Old Problem-- Defacto Standardized

Understanding MCF2L 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. In a recent study published in Current Biology, Hunt and Chittka (2015) did just that: in a series of experiments they investigated whether bees make memory conjunction errors. For the purpose of our argument we will focus on the last experiment, which we consider to be the most convincing one. Authors trained bees to first find a reward (sugar solution) in artificial flowers with a black and white (b/w) pattern (a ring in one group, a grid in another group). Next bees from both groups were rewarded on plain blue flowers but not in the previously rewarded b/w ones. At test 24 h later, bees were presented with the two types of artificial flowers previously experienced and two new types: blue rings and blue grids. Note that whereas for one group the blue grid was the conjunction stimulus and the blue ring only shared one feature with the previously experienced stimuli (i.e., feature stimulus), for the other group the opposite was true. Bees preferred searching in blue flowers. However, they quickly developed a preference for the corresponding conjunction stimulus (e.g., blue ring) over the b/w and the feature stimuli (e.g., blue grid). This design illustrates that bees merge features of previously experienced flowers and rules out simple generalization, as an explanation for bees' responses. But is this preference for the conjunction stimuli in the second half of the experiment evidence for a memory conjunction error? The outcome is different from typical memory conjunction errors in humans. Firstly, humans make memory conjunction errors after short retention intervals, while the bees did not (first experiment; not described above) (e.g., Reinitz et al., 1996; Jones et al., 2007).