Are animals stuck in time?

Abstract

People can time travel cognitively because they can remember events having occurred at particular times in the past (episodic memory) and because they can anticipate new events occurring at particular times in the future. The ability to assign points in time to events arises from human development of a sense of time and its accompanying time-keeping technology. The hypothesis is advanced that animals are cognitively stuck in time: that is, they have no sense of time and thus have no episodic memory or ability to anticipate long-range future events. Research on animals' abilities to detect time of day, track short time intervals, remember the order of a sequence of events, and anticipate future events are considered, and it is concluded that the stuck-in-time hypothesis is largely supported by the current evidence.

Cites (116)

1. Untitled work
   1983 · Medical Entomology and Zoology
2. Optimal foraging, the marginal value theorem
   Charnov, Eric L. · 1976 · Theoretical Population Biology
3. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation
   2021 · Psychology of Learning and Motivation
4. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory
   Lyle E. Bourne · 1977
5. Episodic and semantic memory
   2007 · Cognitive Psychology
6. The organization of learning
   Charles Randy Gallistel · 1990
7. Scalar expectancy theory and Weber's law in animal timing.
   John Gibbon · 1977 · Psychological Review
8. How many memory systems are there?
   Tulving, Endel · 1985 · American Psychologist
9. Context, time, and memory retrieval in the interference paradigms of Pavlovian learning
   Bouton, Mark E. · 1993 · Psychological Bulletin
10. The mentality of apes, 1917.
    Köhler, Wolfgang · 1948 · Readings in the history of psychology.

Show all 116 references

Cited by (50)

1. The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans?
   Suddendorf, Thomas, Corballis, Michael C. · 2007 · Behavioral and Brain Sciences
2. Untitled work
   Eichenbaum · 2004 · 10.1016/j.neuron.2004.08.028
3. Prospection: experiencing the future
   Gilbert, Daniel T., Wilson, Timothy D. · 2007 · Science
4. Patterns of brain activity supporting autobiographical memory, prospection, and theory of mind, and their relationship to the default mode network
   Spreng, R. Nathan, Grady, Cheryl L. · 2010 · Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
5. The Development of Autobiographical Memory
   Fivush, Robyn · 2011 · Annual Review of Psychology

See all 428