Talk Title: Barcoding of episodic memories in the hippocampus of a food-caching bird

Talk Abstract: 

Episodic memory is an extraordinary component of cognition which binds together a constellation of features co-occuring in a single experience. This memory can later be recalled and used flexibly to guide behavior. I study this ability using chickadees – birds which cache food at scattered locations and use hippocampal-dependent memory to find their caches later in time. My work identifies a code in hippocampal activity which appears transiently during memory formation, uniquely encodes the identity of individual memorable events, and is reactivated during memory recall. This neural 'barcode' may serve as a unique identifier for each memorable event to assist rapid formation of many non-interfering memories.

This talk will not be live streamed