Episodic-like memory and how birds store their food

Today we visited department of Neurophysiology of Academy of science and there we listened to two presentations and one was about signal transfer and memory storage and processing.

When speaking about the memory in human, we can distinguish 2 distinct categories:
Implicit memory (perceptual, procedural, priming)
Explicit memory (autobiographical or episodical)

All the thing about memory is very interesting, beginning with the H.M.patient who was living without hippocampus and from the operation on he wasn't able to transfer things from short-term to long-term explicit memory eventhough he was able to learn some skills (implicit memory). But these things as well as the signal transfer in neurons and the changes in synapses or neurotransmitters aren't what I'd like to speak about right now.

One thing which was particulary interesting for me was episodic-like memory in animals, especialy in birds. Surely we can't ask them what and how they remember. But there are few experiments that can tell us more about their memory and thoughts. They are able to store their food in some specific places before winter (hunderds of places) and then during the winter they will recall where is their food located and search for it - they can remember where. Further they can store not only seeds (peanuts) but also waxworms and when they can't go for the food for a few days, they will then go directly to the places where are seeds, because they know that worms aren't fresh by that time - so they can remember what and how. There is another very interesting thing about birds. They steel the food to each other sometimes. And when the bird has been already robbed then its behavior is different than the behavior of the one who haven't met the stealer yet. So they can remember the episodes...This research was done by Dickinson 1998 on Western scrub jays. It is called episodic-like because there is no proof of autonoetic consciousness.

Following research tried to find such a behavior in mammals. Nowdays there are many tests with rats who try to remember where in the maze is located the food or where the adversible stimuli will be. They can remember this based on their egocentric frame or on allocentric frame based on some signs around the "maze".

One problem about these experiments is that it is not spontaneous, but it is based on repetition. Speaking about repetition we should forgot on habitutation.

Further info:
http://www.dandydesigns.org/id21.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding_%28animal_behavior%29
Episodic-like memory