Hippocampus in Animals

Professor Howard Eichenbaum discusses research indicating that the basic operations of the hippocampus are the same in humans and animals.

There is now growing evidence that the hippocampus may fulfill the same basic functions in animals as it does in humans. Of course it's impossible and it’s likely we’ll never be able to do the kinds of tests of subjective experience one has the impression of in humans. In humans, when we want to find out if you remember something, we simply ask them and they tell you about their experiences from the past. In animals of course, we can’t do that sort of thing. But to the extent that we can define objectively, our capacity for recollection, the ability to remember the context in which items were experienced before, the ability to remember sequences of events that together compose a whole experience played out in time, and to the extent we can remember how experiences are related to one another, those things we can actually test in animals and all the evidence so far suggests the hippocampus is as crucial to those functions in animals as it appears to be in humans.