The term "episodic memory" was introduced by Tulving to refer to what he considered a uniquely human capacity—the ability to recollect specific past events, to travel back into the past in one's own mind—as distinct from the capacity simply to use information acquired through past experiences. Subsequently, Clayton et al. developed criteria to test for episodic memory in animals. According to these criteria, episodic memories are not of individual bits of information; they involve multiple components of a single event "bound" together. Clayton sought to examine evidence of scrub jays' accurate memory of "what," "where," and "when" information and their binding of this information. In the wild, these birds store food for retrieval later during periods of food scarcity. Clayton's experiment required jays to remember the type, location, and freshness of stored food based on a unique learning event. Crickets were stored in one location and peanuts in another. Jays prefer crickets, but crickets degrade more quickly. Clayton's birds switched their preference from crickets to peanuts once the food had been stored for a certain length of time, showing that they retain information about the what, the where, and the when. Such experiments cannot, however, reveal whether the birds were reexperiencing the past when retrieving the information. Clayton acknowledged this by using the term "episodic-like" memory.


The primary purpose of the passage is to


explain how the findings of a particular experiment have been interpreted and offer an alternative interpretation

describe a particular experiment and point out one of its limitations

present similarities between human memory and animal memory

point out a flaw in the argument that a certain capacity is uniquely human

account for the unexpected behavior of animal subjects in a particular experiment

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正确答案是 B。因为文章提到 Clayton et al 开发了一种考验动物 episodic memory 的方法,然后用 scrub jays 作为研究对象来测试这种方法的效果。文章进一步描述了 Clayton 的实验,以及他的实验在测试 what, where, and when 信息时存在的局限性。因此,文章的主要目的是描述一个特定的实验并指出其局限性,所以答案是 B。

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