Radcliffe fellow tracks squirrels for insights on human memory
Lucia Jacobs, a professor in the Psychology Department and the Helen Wills Institute of Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, will spend part of her time as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study exploring squirrel brains. Jacobs is particularly interested in how the animals cache and retrieve their food and what happens in the memory-associated hippocampus during that process. “Hippocampal plasticity is critical for human memory,” she says, “so there could be something interesting to learn there from squirrels.” Q&A Lucia Jacobs GAZETTE: How did you get interested in studying squirrels? JACOBS: Squirrels have always fascinated me; I especially remember racing every Easter morning to get to the chocolate eggs before the squirrels did. But I became interested scientifically in their foraging behavior when I started graduate school at Princeton. I was interested in behavioral ecology and how animals make foraging decisions, and gray squirrel foraging was particularly complex because of their...