Making decisions with the future in mind: Developmental and comparative identification of mental time travel
Section snippets
Future-oriented behavior
It is adaptive to act in ways that increase future survival chances, as long as this does not interfere with current survival needs. Many species display future-oriented behavior, behavior that makes sense only in the light of events that follow it. The adaptive function of behavior, however, has to be separated from the mechanisms that produce it. Future-oriented behavior may not always be based on the individual representing a temporally displaced event, just as mental time travel may not
Language and the development of mental time travel
Some argue that mental time travel is only made possible through language (e.g., Macphail, 2000). We do not think, however, that the absence of language in animals precludes them a priori from mental time travel. Instead, we have argued that the evolution of content must have preceded the evolution of means by which to communicate this content (Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997). Others claim that without language there may be no way of showing mental time travel in nonhuman animals because there
Mental time travel and changes in motivation
Before we introduce an approach on how we might test mental time travel in children and animals, we need to briefly digress and look at key implications of this ability on an organism’s motivational system. Perhaps it is best to tackle this issue from its most complex manifestations and then work down to what is essential. Let us therefore return to Dawkins’ open letter to Prince Charles in which he warns against naïve glorification of nature as the alternative to rational scientific approaches
Mental Time Travel in Action: A Proposal for a NonVerbal Test
Such a test should provide subjects with the opportunity to anticipate a future need. We can exclude simple learning explanations if no trial and error learning opportunity is provided. Analysis of performance on the first trial, for example, can rule out such an explanation. Instinctual explanations, in turn, can be excluded if the experimental scenario does not involve behavior typical of the species tested and if they can solve such problems in a variety of contexts. Coincidence, of course,
The rooms task: A preliminary investigation
Children spend time in an “empty room” and an “active room” and were allowed to take one of several items from the active room to the empty room. Instead of manipulating thirst, however, we created a scenario that drew on the child’s desire to play or avoid boredom. The only object in the empty room was a puzzle board without its puzzle pieces. The puzzle pieces were one of the options children could select in the active room to take back to the empty room. A pilot study demonstrated that
Results and discussion
There were no significant differences across gender and thus the data were collapsed. Analysis of the choices made between conditions revealed that children in the experimental condition were more likely to select the target toy than children in the control condition (χ2 (1, N = 47) = 6.88, p = .009). This effect was present in the two older age groups, four-year-olds (χ2 (1, N = 16) = 6.563, p = .01), and five-year-olds (χ2 (1, N = 16) = 5.333, p = .021), but not in the three-year-olds. Both in the experimental and
Acknowledgments
Work on this manuscript was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP0208300) to the first author. We thank Valerie Stone for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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