Topic: food-caching birds

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 b