Short abstract:
The advancing techniques of neuroscience and psychology, and the nature of the empirical approach has led to a view in which memory arises from multiple, independent, cognitive and biological mechanisms. However, in the real world these processes might be independent, but they also need to interact. How they interact is likely to be key to making translation from the laboratory to the clinic to help with memory loss. I will outline the case of episodic and spatial memory and consider how a multi-species comparison is important (humans are not as special as we might like to think), how we need to think about the design of our experiments from the point of view of behaviour, and not theory, and how different disciplinary perspectives can challenge existing theories and offer new methodological approaches to understanding memory in the real world from an empirical perspective.

Short bio:
Alex Easton trained as a physiologist at Oxford before moving to a PhD in Psychology. Throughout his career he has worked on the nature of long-term memory across animals and humans with a particular focus on episodic memory and the role of context. During his career he has developed new models of dense amnesia, developed new models of episodic memory in rodents, and led large scale interdisciplinary projects in memory offering critical new perspectives on memory in neuroscience. He is currently Professor of Psychology at Durham University and Director of Durham’s Institute of Advanced Study. He is President of the European Brain and Behaviour Society, and Editor in Chief of the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.