Dolphin Memory: A Tool to Understand Our Memories

We can better understand our development memories thanks to dolphins. It is the center of a psychological study conducted by researchers at the University of Cambridge. In collaboration with the Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology of the University of Turin and the Zoomarine Park in Rome. Dolphins of the species Tursiops truncatus appear to be able to remember information without any training. Information related to “where” and “who” gave them an item. This reveals that dolphins have one “episodic” memory, that is, it contains information dated to space and time. The study shows that dolphins can remember information they didn’t know was important.

In the initial stages of the study, we trained 8 dolphins to take a buoy and then return it to a specific location in their aquarium.

Elias Garcia-Pelegrin

In the memory test, the researcher again asks the dolphin to bring the object back, but at this stage the object is no longer in the position where it was released. In this situation, the only possibility for the dolphin to perform the task assigned by the researcher is to remember the previous episode and in particular where the object was and who was the researcher who left it, that is. say additional information is stored in a way automatically.

Luigi Baciadonna, UniTo researcher and co-author of the study

All dolphins passed the ‘where’ memory test and seven of the eight dolphins passed the ‘who’ memory test. The interesting aspect is that the information retrieved into memory, essential to pass the tests, was secondary and not essential to the recovery of the object in the pre-test test. All this suggests an episodic memory in these marine mammals.

Livio Favaro, co-author and researcher in Marine Biology at the University of Turin

Thanks to the study, future research will shed light on further aspects of human memory development.