Behavioral evidence for memory replay of video episodes in the macaque.

Journal Article (Journal Article)

Humans recall the past by replaying fragments of events temporally. Here, we demonstrate a similar effect in macaques. We trained six rhesus monkeys with a temporal-order judgement (TOJ) task and collected 5000 TOJ trials. In each trial, the monkeys watched a naturalistic video of about 10 s comprising two across-context clips, and after a 2 s delay, performed TOJ between two frames from the video. The data are suggestive of a non-linear, time-compressed forward memory replay mechanism in the macaque. In contrast with humans, such compression of replay is, however, not sophisticated enough to allow these monkeys to skip over irrelevant information by compressing the encoded video globally. We also reveal that the monkeys detect event contextual boundaries, and that such detection facilitates recall by increasing the rate of information accumulation. Demonstration of a time-compressed, forward replay-like pattern in the macaque provides insights into the evolution of episodic memory in our lineage.

Full Text

Duke Authors

Cited Authors

  • Zuo, S; Wang, L; Shin, JH; Cai, Y; Zhang, B; Lee, SW; Appiah, K; Zhou, Y-D; Kwok, SC

Published Date

  • April 2020

Published In

Volume / Issue

  • 9 /

Start / End Page

  • e54519 -

PubMed ID

  • 32310083

Pubmed Central ID

  • PMC7234809

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 2050-084X

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 2050-084X

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.7554/elife.54519

Language

  • eng