Episodic memory is a form of long-term memory that refers to facts, data, personal experiences, or specific events that are tied to particular times and places and can be recalled at will. This form of memory is thought to be connected to self-awareness in an animal. The most important feature in this form of memory is the ability to recall past events or experiences after the incident had occurred. This is a form of memory that is well known and explored in humans, but its existence in non-human animals is heavily argued over. Due to the difficulties that come with designing an experiment to test this self-awareness in non-human animals it is often called episodic-like memory rather than episodic memory.
This recall ability can be assessed by using an unexpected recall test in which the event being tested is encoded incidentally, the creation of a memory without purposely knowing that memorization is …show more content…
In order to participate in the “Do as I Do’’ method of testing the dogs had to be trained by their owners. “Do as I Do’’ training, occurred in two phases both of which involved the dogs being trained to match their behavior to three actions in phase one and six action in phase two that were demonstrated by their owners when they are given the command “Do it!”. Table S1 contains the objects and actions that were used throughout the experiment. This training was accomplished via operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is a form of learning in which the strength of a behavior is modified by the behavior's consequences on the subject such as reward with food or favorite toys or punishment. The behavior of the subject was controlled by discriminative stimuli to signal those consequences. The phases of training were considered complete when the dogs were capable of achieving an imitation success rate of