Neural code for episodic memories in a food-caching bird

Throughout each day the brain captures snapshots of distinct experiences, forming episodic memories that often last a lifetime. This function depends on the hippocampus – a brain region that is evolutionarily conserved across vertebrates. My lab studies the relationship between hippocampal activity and episodic memory using a unique model organism – the black-capped chickadee. Chickadees are specialist food-caching birds that store thousands of food items at concealed locations in their environment and use memory later in time to retrieve their caches. I will describe our effort in designing behavioral arenas and neural recording techniques to study these behaviors in laboratory conditions. I will share our discoveries of spatial representations in the chickadee hippocampus, as well as our latest data on how neural activity in this region represents the content of distinct memories. Finally, I will offer a general, mechanistic model of episodic memory in the hippocampus inspired by our chickadee data.