In reasoning tasks, non-human animals attend more to relational than to object similarity. It is precisely this focus on relational similarity that has been argued to explain the reasoning gap ...between humans and other animals. Work with humans has revealed that objects placed near each other are represented to be more similar than objects placed farther apart. Will distance between objects also affect non-human animals' abilities to represent and reason about objects? To test this, wild bumblebees were presented with a spatial reasoning task (with competing object matches) in which the objects or features alone (colour, shape) were placed close together or far apart. Bumblebees spontaneously attended to objects over relations, but only when the objects were far apart. Features alone were not strong enough to drive object matching-suggesting that bumblebees bound colour and shape into their object representations. These findings question whether the ability to focus on and compare objects is what makes human abstract reasoning unique.
Spatial cognitive abilities are fundamental to foraging animal species. In particular, being able to encode the location of an object in relation to another object (i.e., spatial relationships) is ...critical for successful foraging. Whether egocentric (i.e., viewer-dependent) or allocentric (i.e., dependent on external environment or cues) representations underlie these behaviours is still a highly debated question in vertebrates and invertebrates. Previous research shows that bees encode spatial information largely using egocentric information. However, no research has investigated this question in the context of relational similarity. To test this, a spatial matching task previously used with humans and great apes was adapted for use with wild-caught bumblebees. In a series of experiments, bees first experienced a rewarded object and then had to spontaneously (Experiment 1) find or learn (Experiments 2 and 3) to find a second one, based on the location of first one. The results showed that bumblebees predominantly exhibited an allocentric strategy in the three experiments. These findings suggest that egocentric representations alone might not be evolutionary ancestral and clearly indicate similarities between vertebrates and invertebrates when encoding spatial information.
Mental time travel (MTT) is the ability that allows humans to mentally project themselves backwards in time to remember past events (i.e., episodic memory) or forwards in time to imagine future ...events (i.e., future thinking). Despite empirical evidence showing that animals might possess MTT abilities, some still claim that this ability is uniquely human. Recent debates have suggested that it is the temporal cognitive mechanism (i.e., ability to represent the sense of past and future) that makes MTT uniquely human. Advances in the field have been constrained by a lack of comparative data, methodological shortcomings that prevent meaningful comparisons, and a lack of clear conceptualizations of the temporal cognitive mechanism. Here I will present a comprehensive review into MTT in humans and animals—with a particular focus on great apes. I will examine three of the most prominent and influential theoretical models of human MTT. Drawing on these accounts, I suggest that a basic way of understanding time might be shared across species, however culture and language will play a critical role at shaping the way we elaborate mental representations about past and future events.
This article is categorized under:
Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition
Psychology > Comparative Psychology
The human uniqueness of MTT has been discussed in the context of autonoetic awareness—leading comparative research to a deadlock since this type of consciousness is empirically intractable in nonverbal populations. Recently it has been argued that it is the temporal component that makes this ability uniquely human—the temporal aspect can be tested in nonverbal populations.
Between 3 and 5 years of age, children develop the ability to plan for their own and others' future needs; however, they have great difficulty predicting future needs that conflict with current ones. ...Importantly, this ability has only been tested in the domain of physiological states (e.g., thirst). Therefore, it is still an open question whether in a different context preschoolers can disengage from their current needs to secure a different future one. In a Resource Allocation task, 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds had to distribute three types of rewards between themselves and another child for either ‘right now’ or ‘tomorrow’. Children's current needs were manipulated by providing them (or not) with their preferred reward at beginning of the task. Only 5‐year‐olds could predict future needs that conflict with their current ones and act accordingly. Younger children's performance is discussed in the context of temporal and social distance.
Statement of contribution
What is already known on this subject?
By the age of 4, children can plan for their own and others' future needs.
Seven‐year‐old children still have difficulty predicting future physiological needs that conflict with their current ones.
What does this study add?
In a Resource Allocation task, preschoolers had to share rewards with another child for ‘right now’ or ‘tomorrow’.
Children's current needs were manipulated by providing them (or not) with their preferred reward.
This study shows that 5‐year‐olds can predict future (non‐physiological) needs that conflict with their current ones.
Much developmental (and comparative) research has used Tulving's Spoon test (i.e., whether an individual will select an item needed to solve a future problem) as the basis for designing tasks to ...measure episodic future thinking, defined as the capacity to mentally pre‐experience the future. There is, however, intense debate about whether these tasks successfully do so. Most notably, it has been argued that children may pass (i.e., select an item with future utility) by drawing on non‐episodic, associative processes, rather than on the capacity to represent the future, per se. Although subsequent developmental tasks have sought to address this limitation, we highlight what we argue is a more fundamental shortcoming of Spoon tasks: they prompt future‐directed action making it impossible to determine whether children have used their episodic future thinking to guide their behavior. Accordingly, we know little about children's thought about the future that is independently generated (i.e., without prompting), or autocued, and is subsequently reflected (and measurable) by children's actions. We argue that this capacity is a critical, and heretofore overlooked, transition in future‐oriented cognition that may not occur until middle childhood. We further hypothesize that it is reliant on children developing richer and more detailed future event representations, along with the necessary cognitive control to transform these representations into actions that serve to benefit their future selves. The time is ripe for researchers to explore this aspect of cognitive development and we suggest several novel approaches to do so.
This article is categorized under:
Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development
We argue that young children's future‐directed actions—as most notably assessed by “Spoon” tasks—are often externally cued and/or prompted (bottom panels) and, unlike in adults, do not stem from independently generated or, autocued, thought about the future that subsequently drives their actions (top panels).
The ability to think about and plan for the future is a critical cognitive skill for our daily life. There is ongoing debate about whether other animals possess future thinking. Part of the ...difficulty in resolving this debate is that there is not a definite methodology that allow us to conclude that animals (and human children) are truly thinking about a future event. Research with humans-both children and adults- will benefit the field of comparative psychology by providing information about the range of humans' responses when they are faced with problems similar to those presented to other animals. Inspired by a problem that chimpanzees experienced in the wild, children of 4 and 5 years of age and young adults were presented with a situation in which they were expected to select two tools in order to obtain a reward. More older children than 4 years old successfully obtained the reward. Adults also succeeded at solving the problem. However, both children and adults struggled to select the two correct tools
any tool-use action was executed. While children's performance is discussed in the context of temporal components required to envisage future events, adults' performance is interpreted in the context of cognitive effort. These findings link developmental and adult cognition with comparative psychology.
Determining the memory systems that support nonhuman animals’ capacity to remember distant past events is currently the focus an intense research effort and a lively debate 1–3. Comparative ...psychology has largely adopted Tulving’s framework by focusing on whether animals remember what-where-when something happened (i.e., episodic-like memory) 4–6. However, apes have also been reported to recall other episodic components 7 after single-trial exposures 8, 9. Using a new experimental paradigm we show that chimpanzees and orangutans recalled a tool-finding event that happened four times 3 years earlier (experiment 1) and a tool-finding unique event that happened once 2 weeks earlier (experiment 2). Subjects were able to distinguish these events from other tool-finding events, which indicates binding of relevant temporal-spatial components. Like in human involuntary autobiographical memory, a cued, associative retrieval process triggered apes’ memories: when presented with a particular setup, subjects instantaneously remembered not only where to search for the tools (experiment 1), but also the location of the tool seen only once (experiment 2). The complex nature of the events retrieved, the unexpected and fast retrieval, the long retention intervals involved, and the detection of binding strongly suggest that chimpanzees and orangutans’ memories for past events mirror some of the features of human autobiographical memory.
•First study addressing unexpected and cued recall of both general and unique events•Chimpanzees and orangutans recalled events that happened weeks and years earlier•Subjects also showed evidence of binding•Chimpanzees and orangutans share this form of autobiographical memory with humans
Young children have difficulty predicting a future physiological state that conflicts with their current state. This finding is explained by the fact that children are biased by their current state ...(e.g., thirsty and desiring water) and thus have difficulty imagining themselves in a different state (e.g., not thirsty and desiring pretzels) "tomorrow," for example. Another potential explanation that we explore here is that young children have difficulty understanding how physiological states, like thirst, fluctuate over time. We asked 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds (Experiment 1) and adults (Experiment 2) to predict what a thirsty Experimenter-who preferred crisps to water-would want ("water" or "crisps") "right now" and "tomorrow." Only adults correctly predicted someone else's future desires when this person's future and current desires conflicted. In contrast, both adults and children in the control groups (in which the Experimenter was not thirsty) had no difficulty predicting that the Experimenter would want crisps "right now" and "tomorrow." Our findings suggest that children's difficulty predicting future desires cannot solely be attributed to their being biased by their current state since the children in our study were, themselves, not thirsty. We discuss our results in the context of children's difficulty understanding fluctuations in physiological states.
Humans are constantly acquiring new information and skills. However, forgetting is also a common phenomenon in our lives. Understanding the lability of memories is critical to appreciate how they are ...formed as well as forgotten. Here we investigate the lability of chimpanzees' short-term memories and assess what factors cause forgetting in our closest relatives. In two experiments, chimpanzees were presented with a target task, which involved remembering a reward location, followed by the presentation of an interference task-requiring the recollection of a different reward location. The interference task could take place soon after the presentation of the target task or soon before the retrieval of the food locations. The results show that chimpanzees' memories for the location of a reward in a target task were compromised by the presentation of a different food location in an interference task. Critically, the temporal location of the interference task did not significantly affect chimpanzees' performance. These pattern of results were found for both Experiment 1-when the retention interval between the encoding and retrieval of the target task was 60 seconds- and Experiment 2-when the retention interval between the encoding and retrieval of the target task was 30 seconds. We argue that the temporal proximity of the to-be-remembered information and the interference item during encoding is the factor driving chimpanzees' performance in the present studies.
Humans are able to transcend the present and mentally travel to another time, place, or perspective. Mentally projecting ourselves backwards (i.e., episodic memory) or forwards (i.e., episodic ...foresight) in time are crucial characteristics of the human memory system. Indeed, over the past few years, episodic memory has been argued to be involved both in our capacity to retrieve our personal past experiences and in our ability to imagine and foresee future scenarios. However, recent theory and findings suggest that semantic memory also plays a significant role in imagining future scenarios. We draw on Tulving's definition of episodic and semantic memory to provide a critical analysis of their role in episodic foresight tasks described in the developmental literature. We conclude by suggesting future directions of research that could further our understanding of how both episodic memory and semantic memory are intimately connected to episodic foresight.
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