Title: Chapter 2.5 Representing past and future events
Abstract: Although much research on cognitive time travel in animals is relatively recent, its origins can be traced to an anticipatory conditioned response in Pavlovian conditioning and to various instrumental conditioning phenomena, including contrast effects (e.g., the increase in responding that often occurs in anticipation of the reduction in the density of reinforcement), the differential outcomes effect (facilitated performance on a conditional discrimination when conditional cues are followed by discriminably different outcomes), and the apparent finding that when rats learn a radial maze they may anticipate choosing arms not yet chosen. Many of these findings suggest a form of prospective stimulus coding. More recently, researchers have asked whether animals can cognitively travel back in time to retrieve information about past events (episodic memory). Several researchers have shown that animals are capable of remembering the what, where, and when of an event but we have argued that such evidence is neither necessary nor sufficient evidence for episodic memory. Instead, we have argued that better evidence for episode memory requires that an animal provide “an answer to an unexpected question” (e.g., “What did you experience?” or “What did you do?”). We (and others) have reported evidence that animals can answer such questions. The ability of animals to anticipate future events (future planning) has also been reported. Thus, although conclusive evidence for cognitive time travel in animals is limited by the fact that the phenomenon is personal (i.e., it has a strong subjective component), there is accumulating evidence that animals show behavior that when reported in humans would be taken as evidence for cognitive time travel.
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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