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+--- Thread: Mental time travel in humans. Animals can animals do it too? (/thread-1767.html)
Mental time travel in humans. Animals can animals do it too? - elte - Dec 23, 2015
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-12-mental-travelan-exclusively-human-capacity.html
"Are humans the only ones who are able to remember events that they had experienced and mentally time travel not only into the past but also the future? Or do animals have the same capacity? To a certain extend, according to three researchers who are contributing a new theoretical model to this long-standing discussion. They published their results in the journal Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews."
'…There is, however, no evidence that they are able to construct, reflect and compare different future scenarios like humans are. We therefore don't believe that animals are capable of mental time travel," says Prof Sen Cheng. For example, the ability of squirrels to cache food in autumn for the winter can be interpreted not as an anticipatory activity, but rather as innate behaviour. "The squirrel would hoard food even if it had been fed in the winter all its life," says Cheng.'
RE: Mental time travel in humans. Animals can animals do it too? - C C - Dec 24, 2015
They definitely have a subconscious or functional recollection activated by familiar stimuli, which can cause them to make certain decisions / actions based on past situations. But the question would be how much those triggered memories introspectively manifest as something visual, aural, olfactal, etc as opposed to remaining part of an opaque mechanistic process. Due to their "proto-language" consisting of little more than a few signifiers, it would be extremely difficult for them to develop conceptual narratives about past events -- theoretical understandings of them and contextual significances about them, that were privately entertained as opposed to just inducing outward behavioral responses. An animal's "internal life" is probably richer than we imagine, but just not well-organized in terms of the regulating standards which humans have gradually invented over the ages.