William A. Roberts
The University of Western Ontario

Can Animals Cognitively Time Travel
to the Past and Future?

An interesting issue in comparative cognition is whether animals, like people, can cognitively time travel or think about their past and anticipate their future. Earlier reviews of what evidence was available suggested animals could not cognitively time travel and that they were stuck in time or largely limited to awareness of only the present moment. Their memory was held to be semantic but not episodic. More recent studies from my laboratory and others with birds, nonhuman primates, and rats now suggest that these animals may have episodic-like memory and be able to plan for the future. The comparative implications and possible limitations of these new findings will be discussed.

 

Dr. William A. Roberts is currently editor of Learning & Motivation . He has authored the book Principles of Animal Cognition , the influential Psychological Bulletin article “Are Animals Stuck in Time?” plus over 130 other articles, books and book chapters. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes and Animal Learning & Behavior . Dr. Roberts' research investigating processes involved in short-term and long-term memory, spatial navigation and memory, concept formation, time estimation, and counting has been funded continuously since 1970 by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. He received his doctorate. in comparative psychology under Dr. M. E. Bitterman from Bryn Mawr College .

 

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