Route-planning and the comparative study of future-thinking

Mental Time Travel and language evolution: a narrative account of the origins of human communication

“…Recently, it has been suggested that route-planning may also be used to investigate future thinking in non-human animals (Thom and Clayton, 2015). Indeed, mentally travelling the route to breakfast ahead of time could be considered consistent with a broad definition of future-oriented cognition.…”

Episodic-like memory and mental time travel in animals.

“…Consider food-caching-an animal that stores food with the intention of retrieving it later would certainly seem to exhibit some form of prospective cognition, but it is also plausible that evolution has endowed the animal with a hard wired desire to cache food, oblivious to the future benefits of doing so. Clearly the task is to identify instances in which an animal acts for the future with the future in mind (Thom & Clayton, 2015). Future planning provides a profound cognitive challenge to the motivational system because the subject has to suppress thoughts about their current motivational state to allow them to imagine future needs and dissociate them from current desires.…”

“…This finding might be taken to suggest that the chimpanzees appeared to plan their routes to arrive at the breakfast tree before all the fruit had been eaten, and that in doing so they also planned their sleeping nest sites accordingly. One issue, of course, is that when studying a wild population, it is impossible to control for confounds arising from previous life experience (Thom & Clayton, 2015). Perhaps future work inspired by these careful and detailed observations could be conducted in the laboratory, because controlled manipulations are required to make unambiguous predictions about an animal's behavior given differing present and future needs.…”

Evolutionary Perspectives on Prospective Cognition

“…Unlike the previous anecdotes, these observations were made systematically over a long period of time. However, when studying a wild population it is impossible to control for confounds from previous life experience ( Thom and Clayton, 2015), and controlled manipulations are required to make unambiguous predictions about an animal's behaviour given differing present and future needs.…”