Monkey see, monkey recall: Like humans, they can remember what they've seen, say scientists 

By Daily Mail Reporter  Last updated at 8:01 AM on 29th April 2011

Monkeys can recollect what they've seen, according to the study which offers some of the first clear evidence that, like humans, they have the capacity for memory.

Scientists found that rhesus monkeys can flexibly recall extremely simple shapes from memory, as evidenced by their ability to reproduce those shapes on a computer touch screen. They say the findings suggest that human and monkey memory is more similar than scientists knew. Unlike recognition, recall shows an ability to remember things that are not present in the moment, the researchers explained.  Recall is necessary for planning and imagining and can increase the flexibility of navigation, social behaviour, and other cognitive skills.

Benjamin Basile, of Emory University in the United States said: 'The ability of monkeys to recall these shapes flexibly suggests that they might be able to recollect other types of information that would be useful to them in the wild. 'It's exciting to speculate that they may be able to recollect the appearance of monkeys they know, what favourite foods look like, or the path they would have to take to get to a water source.'

He said it's also possible that the monkeys use their recollection in very limited ways Basile added: 'Maybe it's often just easier to recognise the monkey, the food, or the landmark in front of you. What we do know is that they do seem to have the ability to recall information in the lab.' Earlier studies had shown that recall and recognition tests given to humans require different types of memory.

However, it had been difficult to devise recall tests suitable for other primates, given that they don't draw or talk. In the new study, Basile and Robert Hampton trained five rhesus monkeys on a novel recall test in which they had to reproduce a simple figure on a touch screen from memory. Those shapes included two or three boxes in a grid. After a delay, part of the shape appeared in a different location, and the monkeys had to 'draw' in the rest of the shape by touching where the other boxes should be.

As in humans, the monkeys remembered less in recall than in recognition tests, even under matched conditions, and recall performance deteriorated more slowly over time. Importantly, the monkeys were able to transfer their memory skill to novel shapes; their recall ability wasn't limited only to the shapes they had seen during training. The researchers say that the ability of rhesus monkeys to recall what they've seen in the past suggests that the ability to recollect does not depend on language and may have been present in our common ancestor 30 million years ago.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1381790/Monkey-monkey-recall-Like-humans-remember-theyve-seen-say-scientists.html#ixzz1Kts1AnRL

Extracted from

DISSOCIATION AND MEMORY: A TWO-HUNDRED YEAR PERSPECTIVE

by Adam Crabtree

Full article http://www.joannecrabtree.com/psychotherapyarts/innerMind/dissociationAndMemory.html

A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO DISSOCIATION

In the late 1960's a new wrinkle on dissociation and memory was introduced. It was the discovery of "state-dependent" effects in human beings. The notion, briefly stated, is that when people learn information, undergo an experience, or develop a skill in a specific state of consciousness, they can recall that information, reclaim that experience, or exercise that skill most easily when the original state of consciousness is re-establish. The earliest experiments in this area investigated the effects of certain drugs on memory in animals (Overton 1964, 1968). These were followed by investigations of the effects of alcohol or barbiturate intoxication on human memory (e.g., Goodwin et al. 1969 and Eich 1977). The results proved the old saw that if a person when sober could not remember where he put his keys when drunk, the best way to get the memory back was to get drunk again.

Roland Fischer, a pioneer in this field of investigation (Fischer et al., 1970, Fischer and Landon 1972, Fischer 1976, 1977), attempted to place our understanding of state-bound memory in a framework that takes into account both context and a spectrum of psycho-physical arousal, ranging from hypo- to hyper-arousal (Fischer 1971). He speculated that the more discontinuous the states of arousal, the less ability to retrieve a memory in one state of an event in another. In 1971 Fischer stated: "The implications of this amnesia between disparate levels of arousal for criminology, jurisprudence and psychotherapy have not yet been realized" (Fischer 1971, p. 33); that statement seems to be quite valid yet today.

The implications of the notion of state-dependent learning and state-dependent memory are vast. It can be said that for all people, the so-called normal and the disordered, memories are attached to specific states of consciousness and gaining access to memories depends on returning to the proper state of consciousness.

Memory as state-dependent serves as an experimental model for verifying the understanding of dissociation and memory of Janet. It also confirms the notion that "amnesia" or "forgetting" are misleading concepts to use in attempting to describe dissociative experience, and points instead to dissociation as a partitioned assimilation of information and experiences.

So this is what is comes down to: dissociation, normal and disordered, is the partitioned assimilation of information and experiences. And memory is the retrieval of information and experiences by returning to the compartment into which they were assimilated. There is no "forgetting" followed by "remembering." Instead we move from state of consciousness to state of consciousness and retrieve information or experiential data with greater or less efficiency, depending on the "disparity" of the present state from that in which the information was obtained or the experience was undergone. If the disparity is too great, retrieval will fail.

http://www.joannecrabtree.com/psychotherapyarts/innerMind/dissociationAndMemory.html