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ANIMAL COG PLAN

Describe the evidence that birds can mentally travel backwards and forwards in time. Is consciousness necessary (bias) for this type of cognition? Intro - bias of whether consciousness is necessary Definition of mental time travel (Para 1) Declarative memories can be separated into episodic and semantic. Episodic memories involve flexible reconstruction and imagination of the particularities of specific events, whereas semantic memories are factual knowledge and contextfree. Brain imaging in humans provides evidence for a dissociation, such as patient ‘H.M’ (Milner, 1966) who suffered from impairments to episodic memory from damage to the hippocampus after surgery, but his semantic memory from before the operation was relatively normal. Mental time travel is the ability to imagine events at different points along the continuum of time (Suddendorf and Collins, 2007). Some researchers argue that there is no convincing evidence of this in nonhuman animals, thus mental time travel is unique to humans (Suddendorf and Corballis, 1997). Tulving (1972) believed only humans have the capacity for full episodic memory, thus developed a behavioural criterion for episodic- like memory in animals, requiring the retrieval of where an event took place, what happened and when did it happen. Brief description of ability of humans:

Evidence in birds Para 3 - evidence against Many behavioural ecologists have argued that mental time travel is not possible in nonhuman animals. Tulving’s discrimination of episodic memory - unique to humans (requires autonoetic consciousness) one can know what happened where and when, but this does not equate to remembering the past episode Bischof - Kohler hypothesis (reference) (PIOW) As Dretske noted [19]: event A might cause cognitive change B that effects behaviour C at a later point in time, but this need not imply that B carries any information - the mediator B might be causal rather than informational. The scrub jays retrieval may therefore not be remembering past episodes. Suddendorf and Busby (2003) B might instead be a separate system (some implicit feed-forward algorithm) that causes certain caching and recovery behaviour

Additionally, Anticipating future scenarios using episodic future memory clearly has selective advantages because you can prepare for anticipated events - PIOW Suddendorf and Corballis (1997) One reason for such a limit could be that travelling forward to the experiences and needs of a future self may require much the same processes as theory of mind. Research suggests there may be some evidence for this in chimps (Crockford, 2012) with an understanding of other chimps’ knowledge, but generally there is little evidence for this in nonhuman animals, let alone birds, so it may be associated with the complex social environments that humans navigate. Para 2 - evidence for Paragraph flow - Point that caching of food may illustrate mental time travel - Clayton and Dickinson (1998) (PIOW) Recent evidence indicates that jays may indeed also store information about who, adding to WWW criteria observes them cache (Dally et al. 2006b - look up study). The birds were more likely to move the food to new locations if a more dominant bird observed the caching than if a less dominant bird did so. Raby et al (2007) challenged the Bischof-Kohler hypothesis Evidence of tool use in New Caledonian crows arguabaly demonstrates forward mental time travel in the form of future planning (Kenward et al., 2005) - hand-reared 4 birds which were not able to observe tool use in humans - found all birds spontaneously used tools - EV Is this just an evolutionary instinct - do the birds understand the function of their behaviour?

Is consciousness necessary? Discuss problems with addressing consciousness in animals scientifically (Evaluation) Describe autoneoetic consciousness - suggests mental time requires a concept of the self and of subjective time. Clayton et al., 2000 - can either Insist that autonoetic consciousness is crucial to episodic memory - therefore demonstrating uniquely human ability - Hauser et al., (2002) - human language uniqueness named recursion - we are able to

communicate our cognitive abilities which is not possible in nonhuman animals. Therefore it is not clear how we can distinguish whether nonhuman animals can demonstrate episodic memory in terms of consciousness. This suggests that consciousness is necessary for this discussion as we cannot be sure that birds also experience this conscious experience of self for episodic recall. Or Characterize episodic memory in terms of the information encoded based on Tulving’s definition Bates et al., study? Despite the fact autonoetic consciousness cannot be measured in non-verbal birds, studies illustrate that cognitive biases in starlings (Bateson and Matheson, 2007) influence decision thresholds and thus their behaviour. Although this does not imply conscious experience of emotions similar to that of humans and we cannot objectively measure this, perhaps it indicates that bird’s conscious experience may be involved in this discussion of mental time travel and its ability for autonoetic consciousness should not be ruled out. Intro - To address the question, I will start by presenting a definition for mental time travel. Based on reviewing the current evidence for this ability in birds, my bias leans toward the view that this cognitive function is unique to humans. Despite some strong evidence to suggest a capacity for this function, a form of consciousness is necessary on the basis that full episodic memory requires a conscious experience of the self which is indeterminable for birds or any nonhuman animal. Conclusion Evidence of MTT can be partially found from the findings of caching in scrub jays as reported by Clayton and Dickinson (1998). However, I think that on the premise consciousness is necessary for this cognitive function, we cannot provide conclusive evidence nor assume that this is an ability seen in any other species than human. Perhaps a point of focus for future research should aim to discover new methodological techniques that could somehow demonstrate the subjective cognitive experiences of birds in order to further understand this function....