EPISODIC MEMORY IN RHESUS MONKEYS SPATIAL & TEMPORAL CONTEXTS

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Conscious memory in humans is divided into two types. Semantic memory consists of facts about the world: water is scarce in the desert; seafood must be fresh to be safe. Episodic memory sub-serves the ability to recall autobiographical events: once running out of water on a desert hiking trip, the time you were sickened by spoiled clams at a beach party. While many experiments show that monkeys and other animals remember, it has proven difficult to make this important distinction between semantic and episodic memory in nonhumans. Developing procedures for distinguishing between these two types of memory in monkeys will permit us to make more effective use of nonhuman model systems for understanding normal human cognition and the diseases that affect it. We have begun training monkeys in a large open-field "foraging" memory test in the lab. We have successfully trained monkeys in object discriminations in this open-field context and have begun work on training matching to sample. Monkeys have been slow to acquire this task, in part because of spatial biases. We are now taking two substantially different approaches in this work, one emphasizing spatial memory and the second emphasizing anticipation of future events. The lab has completed a series of 5 behavioral experiments through this work.