Episodic Memory: Uniquely Human?

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We remember many events from our past - from our first day at school to having breakfast this morning. We can 'mentally relive' these events in our mind's eye. This type of memory is called episodic memory. It's distinguished from other kinds of memory, like memory for facts (like the times tables) and memory for skills (like riding a bike). This project addresses two puzzles about episodic memory.First, what is episodic memory's function? Why is it useful for us to have episodic memory in addition to memory for facts and skills? Researchers defend many views on this question, disagreeing about its role in preserving information, imagination, planning, decision making, self-awareness, communication and more. Second, is episodic memory uniquely human? This is a subject of intense debate in the study of animal minds, with some arguing that episodic memory is widespread in animals (Allen & Fortin, 2013), and others that it is uniquely human (Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007). These puzzles are related. Different accounts of episodic memory's function suggest different views on whether nonhumans have it. But many accounts of episodic memory's function are based on knowledge of human memory, so are difficult to apply to nonhumans. At the same time, evidence about the role of memory in animals and AI could inform our understanding of episodic memory's function. At the same time, AI researchers are developing episodic memory 'modules' for artificial agents (Botvinick et al., 2019; Nuxoll & Laird, 2012) - which could shed important light on both of these puzzles. But there are important dissimilarities between biological and artificial memory processes - so any comparisons must be made with caution. This project will bring together evidence about memory in humans, animals and artificial agents to develop a new theory of episodic memory's function. This will be used to advance debates about nonhuman memory and suggest new applications for episodic memory in AI. It will be the first project to give significant philosophical attention to episodic memory in AI, and to bring comparative psychology, AI and philosophy together to inform accounts of episodic memory's function.The project team will critically review the existing literature on episodic memory in AI and comparative psychology, and will use tools of philosophical argument and analysis to explore how episodic memory is understood in these fields, assess whether episodic memory should be ascribed to nonhuman agents, and extract insights about episodic memory's function.Then, through interdisciplinary collaborations, the team will bring comparative psychology and AI together to advance our knowledge of episodic memory. Working with with Professor Nicola Clayton, a world-leading comparative psychologist, the team will explore how tools from AI might advance the study of animal memory. Building on this, the team will collaborate with the developers of the 'Animal-AI Olympics' (Crosby et al., 2020) - a ground-breaking project which pits the intelligence of artificial agents against tests from comparative psychology. They will implement tests of episodic memory in a 3D simulated environment, and use these to test artificial agents with and without episodic memory modules. The results will shed new light on episodic memory's role in intelligence, and the methods for detecting it in animals. Next, the team will draw the results of this work together to develop a new account of episodic memory's function, according to which there may be many forms of episodic memory, including 'minimal' forms in nonhuman animals and more sophisticated forms in humans. And they will assess the ethical implications of this account, exploring episodic memory's role in humans' moral lives, its significance for animal welfare, and the ethical impacts of building machines that remember.