Abstract
A persisting question in the philosophy of animal minds is which nonhuman animals share our capacity for episodic memory (EM). Many authors address this question by primarily defining EM, trying to capture its seemingly unconstrained flexibility and independence from environmental and bodily constraints. EM is therefore often opposed to clearly context-bound capacities like tracking environmental regularities and forming associations. The problem is that conceptualizing EM in humans first, and then reconstructing how humans evolved this capacity, provides little constraints for understanding the evolution of memory abilities in other species: it defines “genuine” EM as independent from animals’ evolved sensorimotor setup and learning abilities. In this paper, I define memory in terms of perceptual learning: remembering means “knowing (better) what to do in later situations because of past experience in similar earlier situations”. After that, I explain how episodic memory can likewise be explained in terms of perceptual learning. For this, we should consider that the information in animals’ ecological niches is much richer than has hitherto been presumed. Accordingly, instead of asking “given that environmental stimuli provide insufficient information about the cache, what kind of representation does the jay need?” we ask “given that the animal performs in this way, what kind of information is available in the environment?” My aim is not to give a complete alternative explanation of EM; rather, it is to provide conceptual and methodological tools for more zoocentric comparative EM-research.
Highlights
At first glance—and probably a couple more—cuttlefish, dogs, bees, chimpanzees, mice and rats, pigeons, scrub jays, crows and a lot more species seem to have little in common
I have first provided a brief reconstruction of the evolutionary debate about episodic memory (EM): is EM a uniquely human capacity or do some or even many animal share it with us? Anthropogenic approaches define EM in an unconstrained way: they try to capture the intuitive fact that episodic memories are seemingly unbound by present circumstances and can be conjured up at will
I argued that this method is anthropogenic and hard to unite with evolutionary theorizing by making EM-like abilities independent of biological constraints
Summary
At first glance—and probably a couple more—cuttlefish, dogs, bees, chimpanzees, mice and rats, pigeons, scrub jays, crows and a lot more species seem to have little in common. Anthropogenic methods are non-ideal for a rich understanding of the evolution of memory abilities, because they define memory independently from animals’ evolved biological (i.e. sensorimotor) constitution and their ecological niches They lack the tools to arrive at a fuller picture of what species share concerning (episodic-like) memory and what is species-specific (see Osvath et al 2014; Barton 2012; Keijzer 2017). 4, I will argue that remembering distal places and things is possible while staying true to a biogenic method This requires an understanding of how regularity and structure in the environment makes available ecological information that an animal’s perception and action systems can learn to detect, such that much of the work commonly attributed to representations can be “off-loaded” to regularity and structure in the environment. My aim is not to account for all details episodic memories can encompass; I instead provide a conceptual analysis that should prove helpful in understanding, in
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
