I am an NERC funded PhD student studying episodic-like memory and timing in rufous hummingbirds under Dr Sue Healy.

Episodic memory is the system by which we recall, and to an extent re-live, the details of past events. Traditional views within psychology have held that this is a uniquely human capacity, but the recent development of a testing paradigm for a memory system functionally paralleling episodic memory, termed "episodic-like" memory, has opened up a new area of interesting research. Since this definition was coined, convincing examples within animal biology have been rare, and largely confined to systems with a natural temporal element, such as food storing birds. I aim to investigate whether the ability of hummingbirds to match time their revisits to flowers constitutes a similar form of episodic-like memory, how such memories are organised, and hopefully to elucidate something of the nature of the timing mechanism birds use in this task.