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Abstract
Commentary: Merging of long-term memories in an insect.
Highlights
Imagine that one of the words that you have to recognize is “insult.” Was “insult” in the list? If you respond “yes,” you are making a conjunction error (Underwood and Zimmerman, 1973; Reinitz et al, 1992; Kroll et al, 1996); that is, you incorrectly recognize a novel word, which is made up of parts of two previously studied items (“in,” “sult”), as being part of the previously studied word list. This example illustrates that human episodic memory is reconstructive and not an accurate representation of previously experienced events (Roediger, 1996; Tulving, 2005)
No research has investigated the reconstructive nature of memory in intact animals, which is crucial to understand the normal functioning of their memory systems
At test 24 h later, bees were presented with the two types of artificial flowers previously experienced and two new types: blue rings and blue grids
Summary
This example illustrates that human episodic memory (memory for events, such as the event of learning a word list) is reconstructive and not an accurate representation of previously experienced events (Roediger, 1996; Tulving, 2005). In a recent study published in Current Biology, Hunt and Chittka (2015) did just that: in a series of experiments they investigated whether bees make memory conjunction errors.
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