Our memories serve us well, but they can also lie to us.
Because of the way our brains store memory information in pieces, aspects of a memory can become mixed up when reconstructing it, resulting in what’s called “confusion.” false memory.
Now, for the first time, evidence of false memories has been found in a creature quite unlike any other – squid.
It’s a clue that may help us better understand what’s powerful. Strange Intelligence It’s not just squid that proves it.Sepia Officinalis), but are also distinguished from their close cephalopod relatives, such as octopuses and squid.
“Our results suggest that squid form visual false memories, but not olfactory false memories.” Create a team “These memory errors could be the first signs that reconstructive processes exist in cephalopod memory,” said Lisa Poncet, a neuroethologist at the University of Caen Normandy in France.
In past experiments, squid have shown some pretty impressive evidence of intelligence, such as passing cognitive tests that are similar to those used on human children. These tests assess the ability to delay rewards. They can also be trained to recognize shapes and associate them with specific snacks.
And in today’s news, they have demonstrated extremely sharp, specific and detailed memory recall. These strange marine animals can remember what they ate, where they ate it and when they ate it. Episode memory.
What Pongset and her colleagues wanted to know was how these memories are recalled—do they emerge from the brain in one smooth motion, or do squid brains, like humans, have to reconstruct fragments of encoded, stored memories?
Because very similar memories can create false memories when mixed together, the researchers designed their experiment accordingly: They exposed squid to a series of very similar experiences involving containers containing snacks.
One tube contained crab meat, and the squid ate it even though crab meat is not its favorite food. The second tube contained shrimp, which squids love. The third tube contained nothing. Each tube was marked with an identification pattern.
The experiment was conducted in three stages.
In stage 1, the squid were shown three tubes so that they could see the unique patterns and contents of the tubes without touching them.
The second stage involved one of several scenarios. In one case, the shrimp tube and the empty tube were presented together, both empty but turned around to hide this fact from the squid. Another scenario was the same, but both tubes were followed by the shrimp scent. In the third scenario, the empty shrimp tube stood alone.
In stage 3, the squid was given an empty tube with a crab pattern on it, and was flipped over again to hide the contents. The idea was to see if the squid could remember exactly which tube contained food, or if it would choose the empty tube due to a false memory, thinking it contained shrimp.
The results weren’t straightforward, but they suggested that false visual information was causing false memories to be created. When the second scenario involved only an empty tube, the squid dug into the crab container about 80% of the time.
However, when presented with both the shrimp and the empty tube in the second portion, the squid performed no better than when they found the crab, as if they mistook the empty tube for one containing shrimp.
Oddly enough, adding a scent to the tank in the second part seemed to counteract the false memory formation, and the crabs again chose the crab tube most of the time. The researchers speculate on several possible reasons, suggesting that the scent of the food may help them resist forming false memories.
The team also acknowledged that they could not rule out a simpler explanation, such as familiarity with empty tubes causing the confusing events.
It’s still early days for research, so all we know for now is that squid may store memories in a way that’s very similar to human memory.
Several other clues have been found to support the idea that squid memory is similar to human memory. 2012 study Common squid have been shown to undergo REM sleep, a stage associated with: Memory stabilization.
In fact, all of this is very interesting to know. Cephalopods diverged from vertebrates about 550 million years ago, and their subsequent evolution has been very different from that of any other organism on Earth. That means these funny creatures could potentially teach us a lot about the evolution of cognition and intelligence.
And there was another fact that suggested that squid intelligence runs much deeper than we knew, and that warrants further investigation.
“What was surprising was that individuals differed in their susceptibility to forming false memories.” Christelle Jozet-Alves said: of the University of Caenormandy.
“While some people appeared unaffected when exposed to misleading events, others formed false memories. This phenomenon is common in our species, and this susceptibility varies between and within individuals.”
I’m sure the squid would be fine too, provided they serve tastier shrimp.
This study was published in: iScience.
