The Neuroscience of Episodic Memory in Food-Caching Chickadees

The brain captures snapshots of distinct experiences throughout the day, forming episodic memories that often last a lifetime. This function depends on the hippocampus — a brain region evolutionarily conserved across vertebrates. Dmitriy Aronov’s lab studies the relationship between hippocampal activity and episodic memory using a unique model organism: the black-capped chickadee. Chickadees are specialist food-caching birds that store thousands of food items at concealed locations in their environment and use their memories to retrieve their caches later.

In this Presidential Lecture, Aronov will describe his group’s effort to design behavioral arenas and neural recording techniques to study these behaviors in laboratory conditions. He will share their discoveries of spatial representations in the chickadee hippocampus. He will also present their latest data on how neural activity in this region represents distinct memories and how vision plays a role in this process.

Aronov is an associate professor of neuroscience at Columbia University and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his Ph.D. at MIT, working on the song system of zebra finches. Hen then worked as a postdoc at Princeton University, researching the rodent hippocampus. In his lab, he developed food-caching birds called chickadees as a new model system for neuroscience research. His team develops behavioral paradigms for working on the natural behavior of these wild birds in the lab. They also work on miniaturized technologies for recording and manipulations in the chickadee brain. By using this exciting new system, Aronov’s lab hopes to gain insight into the neural mechanisms of episodic memory.