Animal Memory is based on the proceedings of a symposium held at Dalhousie University in the summer of 1969. Each of the seven chapters provide broad coverage of the topic with which it is concerned, and the experimental work reported is representative of the most significant developments in the field. The book includes two studies on associative memory—the memory of one event which is essential to its association (over a delay) with subsequent events. One study shows that shows that animals can remember events from one learning trial to the next and that their behavior will be determined largely by the sequences of trials with differing outcomes; the other presents research on the association of flavors with toxicosis in a conditioning paradigm. Separate chapters deal with retentive memory—the retention and forgetting of learned behavior over time; and the physiological basis of memory in terms of consolidation theory. These studies demonstrate that animals do forget and examine theories of forgetting. The final chapter provides a critical discussion based on all of the foregoing material in which the topics covered in the book are related to current work on human retention and forgetting.
