LSE: Public lectures and events Living in the past: exploring memory in humans, animals, and artificial agents
May 20, 2024
Join Nicola Clayton, a comparative psychologist renowned for her insights into avian memory, alongside cognitive scientist Felipe De Brigard, AI researcher Zafeirios Fountas, and philosopher Johannes Mahr. They dive into the fascinating nuances of memory across species. Discover how human memory intersects with imagination, the memory capabilities of birds, and the potential for AI to mimic these processes. They also tackle the challenges of remembering versus forgetting and the ethics surrounding memory in animals and machines.
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Memory and Imagination Link
- Episodic memory and imagination share underlying mechanisms and computational processes.
- Memory reconstructs past events as best possible estimates, intertwining with imaginative counterfactuals.
Scrub Jays' Episodic Caching Memory
- Scrub jays demonstrate episodic memory by remembering what food they hid, where, and when.
- Their caching experiments show they recall food perishability to optimize recovery decisions.
Evolution of Episodic Memory
- Episodic memory probably evolved to aid future planning and social communication.
- The meta-representational aspect of memory supports distinguishing personal experience from imagination essential for communication.