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Updated: Jun 23, 2026

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation for Investigating Causal Brain-behavioral Relationships and their Time Course
Published on: July 18, 2014
The comparative study of mental time travel
William A Roberts1, Miranda C Feeney
1Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5C2, Canada. roberts@uwo.ca
Abstract:
People regularly travel through time mentally to remember and reconstruct past events and to anticipate and plan future events. We suggest that a bi-cone structure best describes human mental time travel (MTT) abilities. Experiments with scrub-jays, rats and non-human primates have investigated whether MTT is uniquely human by examining the abilities of these animals to remember what, where and when an event occurred and to anticipate future events. We argue that animal memory for when an event happened must be distinguished from memory for how long ago it happened to properly evaluate parallels with human capabilities. Similarly, tests of future MTT in animals must show that they are planning for a specific time in the future to demonstrate qualitative comparability with human MTT.
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