Can you remember what you had for dinner last weekend? That ability is a function of episodic memory, and how well we can recall the time and place of specific events typically declines with age. Cuttlefish also seem to exhibit a form of episodic memory, but unlike with humans, their capability doesn't decrease as they get older, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. "Cuttlefish can remember what they ate, where, and when, and use this to guide their feeding decisions in the future," said coauthor Alexandra Schnell of the University of Cambridge, who conducted the experiments at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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.

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.

Dogs have a remarkable ability to recall events from the past, in a similar way to humans. That's according to a new study which found evidence canines have a similar'episodic memory' to their human counterparts. Dogs can recall a person's actions even when they do not expect to have their memory tested, says the research. Previously, evidence that animals use episodic memory has been hard to come by, as it's impossible to ask an animal, in this case a dog, what they remember (stock image) Dogs trained using the trick can watch a person perform an action and carry out the action themselves. For example, if the their owner jumps in the air and then gives the command'do it', the dog would jump in the air. However, the researchers also needed to show that the dogs remembered what they just saw a person do, even when they weren't expecting to be asked or rewarded.