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Mental time travel in the rat.

Jonathon D Crystal1

  • 1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, 1101 E 10TH ST, Bloomington, IN 47405-7007, USA.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences
|September 15, 2024
PubMed
Summary

Searching memory contents in animals is a form of mental time travel (MTT). This animal model requires remembering events, their order, and searching sequences, as demonstrated in rat studies.

Keywords:
animal modelepisodic memoryepisodic-like memoryincidental encodingmental time travelunexpected question

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Animal Behavior
  • Evolutionary Psychology

Background:

  • Episodic memory allows remembering past events.
  • Mental time travel (MTT) involves mentally revisiting past experiences.
  • Understanding MTT in non-humans offers insights into memory's evolution.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To propose a tractable animal model for studying mental time travel (MTT).
  • To identify key cognitive elements required for an animal model of MTT.
  • To review evidence supporting these elements in non-human animals.

Main Methods:

  • Literature review of experimental studies on animal memory and cognition.
  • Analysis of experiments investigating episodic memory in rats.
  • Examination of memory replay mechanisms in rodents.

Main Results:

  • Rats demonstrate the ability to represent multiple events in episodic memory.
  • Evidence suggests rats encode the temporal order of experienced events.
  • Rats utilize memory replay to search episodic memory sequences for specific information.

Conclusions:

  • The proposed three-element model provides a framework for an animal model of MTT.
  • The cognitive foundations for MTT may be evolutionarily ancient.
  • Studying memory search in animals offers a tractable approach to understanding MTT.