26-02-2007, 08:09 PM
Here's a short article from New Scientist which I saw on their website. I thought it might be an interesting read.
Quote:
We're all time travellers, in the sense that we can recall memories and plan for the future. Mental time travel is considered by many to be unique to humans; animals were assumed to be "stuck in time", but now that idea has been challenged... by a bird.
Western scrub jays (Aphelocoma californica) store food in caches, but as with other provisioning animals, such as squirrels, it is difficult to tell whether they do so because they are planning for the future or because the are behaving instinctively, as they do when building a nest or migrating. Also they could simply be hungry.
To see if they had a sense of the future, Nicola Clayton and colleagues at the University of Cambridge allowed eight jays to feed during the day for six days, except in the morning, when they were allowed to enter either a compartment where they got breakfast or one where they didn't. On the evening of day 7 the jays were unexpectedly given extra food, and the researchers found they stashed the surplus in the compartment where they had learned they would not get breakfast. This suggests that they do plan for the future - in this case a future without breakfast (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature05575).
Western scrub jays (Aphelocoma californica) store food in caches, but as with other provisioning animals, such as squirrels, it is difficult to tell whether they do so because they are planning for the future or because the are behaving instinctively, as they do when building a nest or migrating. Also they could simply be hungry.
To see if they had a sense of the future, Nicola Clayton and colleagues at the University of Cambridge allowed eight jays to feed during the day for six days, except in the morning, when they were allowed to enter either a compartment where they got breakfast or one where they didn't. On the evening of day 7 the jays were unexpectedly given extra food, and the researchers found they stashed the surplus in the compartment where they had learned they would not get breakfast. This suggests that they do plan for the future - in this case a future without breakfast (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature05575).