Capturing moments: Does your dog remember what you did?

Think back to what you ate for breakfast this morning. Did you picture yourself in your kitchen and visualize the plate in front of you to remember exactly what you ate? That's called an episodic memory – a memory of a particular event that happened at a specific time and place, as opposed to a semantic memory, which refers to more general knowledge or rules that someone understands. Cognitive scientists have long thought that humans were the only animals capable of traveling down memory lane by having episodic memories. Dogs, for example, were known to commit things to semantic memory. When repeatedly trained to sit, stay, or lie down, they learn a rule. But they, like other nonhuman animals, were thought to live exclusively in the here and now – until now.