Evaluate the evidence for declarative and/or episodic-like memory in non-human animals.

BIOPSYCHOLOGY
(Declarative and/or Episodic-like Memory in Non-Human Animals)
All living organisms, excluding plants are animals. Non-human animals simply refer to the
animals who are not humans, i.e. excluding all Homo sapiens all animals would be regarded
as non-human animals. This term is majorly used to distinguish the characteristics between
the human and other animals. There have been various proposals and researches being
conducted to evaluate various the type of memory in the non-human animals. The declarative
memory (also referred to as explicit memory) is a type of memory used for signifying a
conscious memory which is available permitting an organism to use knowledge in flexible
way. “It consists of information that is explicitly stores and retrieved” (Luke Mastin, 2010).
The research conducted for studying the declarative memory in non-human animals mainly
focuses on the study of the hippocampus (area in the brain) and other related areas. It has
been evaluated that the all mammals including humans have conserved most of the
anatomical details of various areas in parahippocampal region including hippocampus. It has
been suggested that the “functional role of these areas in declarative memory is also
conserved across species and an evolutionary approach will be key to understanding exactly
how the local circuitry of the hippocampus and parahippocampal region supports declarative
memory” (Manns & Eichenbaum, 2006).
The episodic-like memory is a type of declarative memory (other type being semantic
memory) that basically includes all the contextual information. “Moreover, it has been argued
that the subjective experiences that accompany retrieval, such as conscious recollection or the
experience of the event re-occurring, are critical aspects of episodic memory” (Jonathon,
2010). The semantic memory, on the other hand, is the memory that stores the representation
of the factual information without storing any contextual information. Hippocampus is a part
inside the brain which is believed to be determine the episodic memory in humans; thus, there
are several studies which try to determine the memories in non-human animals which depend
upon the hippocampus; thereby, analysing the episodic-memory in the latter. There has been
a basic question in comparative cognition, i.e. do non-human animals able to remember past,
unique experiences or not.
This neurobiological approach of study (aimed on the identification of the areas in brain and
neural processes that are responsible for the memory in animals) had been conducted on rats
and monkeys, both of which were not able to make correct judgements of the recent
happenings due to disrupted pathways of the hippocampus. Victoria and Robert (2013)
reported that “After encountering a list of five odors in sequence, rats with hippocampal
lesions were unable to report which odor occurred earlier in the list” They also suggested that
the “monkeys with fornix transections, which disrupt one of two major afferent-efferent
pathways of the hippocampus, were unable to make accurate recency judgments” (Victoria &
Robert, 2013).
The cognitive analysis method was also used to identify the episodic memory in non-human
animals. This study revealed the side of events that are stored or represented in the brain and
the ways in...