What Human Planning Can Tell Us About Animal Planning: An Empirical Case

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 before 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

"First, I will get the marbles." Children's foresight abilities in a modified spoon task

Previous methodologies used to investigate future thinking (i.e., one-step “spoon test”) do not directly assess temporal reasoning. Consequently, the extent to which foresight is required to solve these tasks has been questioned. In the current study, 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds were presented with atwo-step“spoon test”: to secure a future need (e.g., play with a marble run game), childrenfirsthad to obtain a key that allowed themnextto access the marbles. By the age of 4 children selected the key; however, it is only by the age of 5 that children reasoned about the temporal sequence of future eventsandselected the key. Temporal reasoning, memory for the past events and age significantly contributed to predict children’s ability to select the correct item. These findings suggest that temporal reasoning is crucial to assess future thinking and that item-choice measures alone might not involve foresight

'Will I Want These Stickers Tomorrow?' Preschoolers' Ability to Predict Current and Future Needs

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

Adults' Performance in an Episodic-Like Memory Task: The Role of Experience

Episodic memory is the ability to consciously recollect personal past events. This type of memory has been tested in non-human animals by using depletion paradigms that assess whether they can remember the “what,” “where,” and “when” (i.e., how long ago) of a past event. An important limitation of these behavioral paradigms is that they do not clearly identify the cognitive mechanisms (e.g., episodic memory, semantic memory) that underlie task success. Testing adult humans in a depletion paradigm will help to shed light on this issue. In two experiments, we presented university undergraduates with a depletion paradigm which involved choosing one of two food snacks—a preferred but perishable food and a less preferred but non-perishable food–either after a short or a long interval. Whereas, in Experiment 1, participants were asked to imagine the time between hiding the food items and choosing one of them; in Experiment 2 participants experienced the time elapsed between hiding the food items and choosing one of them. In addition, in Experiment 2 participants were presented with 2 trials which allowed us to investigate the role of previous experience in depletion paradigms. Results across both experiments showed that participants chose the preferred and perishable food (popsicle) after the short interval but did not choose the less preferred and non-perishable food (raisins) after the long interval. Crucially, in Experiment 2 experiencing the melted popsicle in Trial l improved participants' performance in Trial 2. We discuss our results in the context of how previous experience affects performance in depletion tasks. We also argue that variations in performance on “episodic-like memory” tasks may be due to different definitions and assessment criteria of the “when” component

It is about time: Conceptual and experimental evaluation of the temporal cognitive mechanisms in mental time travel

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

Spontaneous relational and object similarity in wild bumblebees

Being able to abstract relations of similarity is considered one of the hallmarks of human cognition. While previous research has shown that other animals (e.g. primates) can attend to relational similarity, they struggle to focus on object similarity. This is in contrast with humans. And it is precisely the ability to attend to objects that it is argued to make relational reasoning uniquely human. What about invertebrates? Despite earlier studies indicating that bees are capable of learning abstract relationships (e.g. ‘same’ and ‘different’), no research has investigated whether bees can spontaneously attend to relational similarity and whether they can do so when relational matches compete with object matches. To test this, a spatial matching task (with and without competing object matches) previously used with children and great apes was adapted for use with wild-caught bumblebees. When object matches were not present, bumblebees spontaneously used relational similarity. Importantly, when competing object matches were present, bumblebees still focused on relations over objects. These findings indicate that the absence of object bias is also present in invertebrates and suggest that the relational gap between humans and other animals is due to their preference for relations over objects

Frames of reference in small-scale spatial tasks in wild bumblebees

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

Relational reasoning in wild bumblebees revisited: the role of distance

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

Adults' performance in an episodic-like memory task: The role of experience

Episodic memory is the ability to consciously recollect personal past events. This type of memory has been tested in non-human animals by using depletion paradigms that assess whether they can remember the "what," "where," and "when" (i.e., how long ago) of a past event. An important limitation of these behavioral paradigms is that they do not clearly identify the cognitive mechanisms (e.g., episodic memory, semantic memory) that underlie task success. Testing adult humans in a depletion paradigm will help to shed light on this issue. In two experiments, we presented university undergraduates with a depletion paradigm which involved choosing one of two food snacks-a preferred but perishable food and a less preferred but non-perishable food-either after a short or a long interval. Whereas, in Experiment 1, participants were asked to imagine the time between hiding the food items and choosing one of them; in Experiment 2 participants experienced the time elapsed between hiding the food items and choosing one of them. In addition, in Experiment 2 participants were presented with 2 trials which allowed us to investigate the role of previous experience in depletion paradigms. Results across both experiments showed that participants chose the preferred and perishable food (popsicle) after the short interval but did not choose the less preferred and non-perishable food (raisins) after the long interval. Crucially, in Experiment 2 experiencing the melted popsicle in Trial l improved participants' performance in Trial 2. We discuss our results in the context of how previous experience affects performance in depletion tasks. We also argue that variations in performance on "episodic-like memory" tasks may be due to different definitions and assessment criteria of the "when" componen