"Using food-caching chickadees to study the neuroscience of episodic memory"
Dmitriy Aronov, PhD
Associate Professor
HHMI Investigator
Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute
Department of Neuroscience
Columbia University
Abstract: 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 neural 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 behavioral arenas and neural recording techniques to study these behaviors in laboratory conditions. I will share our discoveries of spatial representations in the chickadee hippocampus. I will also present our latest data on how neural activity in this region represents distinct memories, and how vision plays a role on this process.
Host: Michael Flores, Brainard Lab