Back to the Future: Mental Time Travel in Animals

The conscious recollection of personal experiences and events in terms of:

- their details (what happened to me?)
- their spatial (where did it happen to me?)
- temporal context (when did it happen to me?) has been termed “episodic memory”.

Humans not only recollect these past experiences, but are also able to elaborate about their perceptions, cognitions and emotions they had at the time.

It was long held that such a ‘mental time travel’ is unique to humans, believing that animals have no awareness of their own past and are ‘stuck in time’, only aware of the immediate present with no idea of their past or possible future.

In the past two decades, behavioral neuroscientists and comparative psychologists have repeatedly questioned this assumption with compelling evidence suggesting that animals might indeed have the capacity to recollect unique personal experiences.

Some authors have moved even further to speculate about the possibility that animals might also be able to think about their own future and could possibly even plan for it.

The presentation addressed the evidence for the existence of ‘mental time travel’ in different animal species including non-human primates, dogs, rodents and birds.

Ekrem Dere, PhD - Conferência SPARCS (Society for the Promotion of Applied Research in Canine Science), 2015.