An elephant never forgets—or does it?

Scientists have long believed that animals do not have so-called episodic memory—the kind that allows humans to remember past events. But recent experiments with scrub jays, chimpanzees, and gorillas have led to rethinking of the nature of memory in animals.

Animal memory researchers first face the challenge of communicating between species. "You can't exactly ask the animals where they were, and what they were doing, when Bambi's mother was shot," says Nicola Clayton, a professor of comparative cognition at University of Cambridge in England and a leading researcher in the field of animal memory.

Over the past six years Clayton has devised a series of ingenious experiments that seem to show that scrub jays can recall past events and use the information to plan for the future.

"We have traditionally regarded animals like machines, or automata, believing that they just have reflexes and habits," says John Pearce, a professor of psychology at Cardiff University in Wales. "Clayton's work is revolutionary because it challenges these ideas and suggests that animals have richer memories than previously thought."

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