Topic: chickadees

How does the brain record individual experiences, and recall them to adaptively guide future behavior? This ‘episodic-like’ memory regime involves the hippocampus, but it has been difficult to identify specific neural signatures with recollection of specific memories, hindering a mechanistic understanding of recall. Studying food caching behaviors may provide a clearer picture. Scatter hoarding species, such as chickadees, cache individual food items, and use hippocampal-dependent memory to later retrieve them. However tools for behavioral and neural measurement in chickadees are underdevelope

Forming an episodic memory requires binding together disparate elements that co-occur in a single experience. One model of this process is that neurons representing different components of a memory bind to an "index"--- a subset of neurons unique to that memory. Evidence for this model has recently been found in chickadees, specialist birds that use hippocampal memory to store and recall locations of cached food. Chickadee hippocampus produces sparse, high-dimensional patterns ("barcodes") that uniquely specify each caching event. Unexpectedly, the same neurons that participate in barcodes als