This article discussed the possibility of Mental Time Travel in Animals. Mental Time Travel was defined in the article as mentally thinking –or traveling- back to a past occurrence and recalling specific details. Previously, it had been argued that the function was possible only in humans, and that other animals could not mentally travel back in time. This article however looked to prove otherwise. In humans, two of the major distinct memory systems are the episodic system and the semantic system. While the Semantic system recalls individual facts about a person’s knowledge of the world, the Episodic recalls memories of personal experiences. The System that functions in episodic memory is assumed to only exist in Human brains. This Study performed tests analyzing the behavior of Scrub Jay birds in order to disprove this assumption. Clayton, Dickinson, and their colleagues argued that the Jays are be able to mentally travel back in time to previous experiences in order to recall where their food is stored and when it will begin to decompose. It was found that the Scrub Jays can form integrative memories of what was stored when and where, and can adjust their recovery attempts based on how long ago they stored their food, allowing them to recover it before it decomposes.
This research showed groundbreaking evidence for our analysis of memory functions in animals. The researches divided their findings into two options. Either the Jay can functionally recall episodic memories, and therefore they process is not unique to humans, or, the Jays have developed a mental system over thousands of years allowing them to subconsciously store the location and time of their storage as a Semantic memory, allowing them to recall it without mentally time traveling. If Option one were correct, then the idea of human uniqueness in recalling memory would be reconsidered. If option two were correct, then more studies would have to be done possibly testing different birds for the ability of mental time traveling.
The article was very interesting and very engaging. There were not an impenetrable amount of technical terms, so it was easy to read and understand. One flaw of the article was that it seemed to recall many hypotheses of previous authors, and some of them seemed to contradict each other.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VH9-496NS6S-2&_user=10&_coverDate=09%2F30%2F2003&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=gateway&_origin=gateway&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1699687397&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=c4c9d5d23c444d1e5377e5181437b578&searchtype=a
