Episodic like memory in animals existent or not

Episodic memory which is memory of what happened, where and when aspects of an event is a popular concept in psychology . It is a well studied phenomena in human psychology. With a growing interest to test the existence of episodic memory in other animals, which is hard to demonstrate as there is always ambiguity due to lack of mutual language in non human subjects. Thus, the researchers came up with a term episodic like memory to represent the phenomena in non human animals. In a study Clayton and colleagues, showed the scrub jay demonstrate episodic like memory. Reserachers stored favourite food of jay worms which decay quickly and peanuts. The caching behaviour of jays showed they remembered the when aspect of food stored along with what and where. After short delay jays searched for their preferred food worms versus peanuts. As the delay increased jays preferred peanuts over worms indicating they had a sense of time thus would avoid worms after delay. In my sight, there can be alternative explanations to this blue jay experiment and similar ones which attempt to demonstrate episodic like memory in n human animals. Firstly, instrumental learning which is that a behaviour is learnt as a result of consequences of it. Positive consequences will lead to the likelihood of the behaviour to be repeated and negative consequences will lead to avoidance of the behaviour in the future.For example, if an animal eats a food and gets sick. It will learn to avoid it in the future. Secondly, stuck in time hypothesis, which is that animals are unable to disconnect current from present and past. Thus the behaviour shown which is taken as a evidence for episodic memory can be just the difference in decaying of information. Another explanation can...

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... learning, stuck in time hypothesis and usage of semantic memory. A problem we encounter in coming up with one solution is that most of cognitive psychological research is based on humans. For instance the duration of short term memory and long term memory. Some species may have short term memory which is long till few hours. thus first this should be confirmed before we determine is episodic emory used or working memory as episodic memory is long term memory. There is a thin line between explicit and implicit memory which is further complicated by the lack of language use. Further Advances in biotechnology can tell is explicit memory being used or implicit, depending on the type of region used in the brain during testing. There are currently such barriers in research of episodic like memory in animals which leads to ambiguity and other explanations may be true.