Humans only species able to time travel: Study

Humans seem to be the only species capable of remembering events that they had experienced and mentally time travel not only into the past but also the future, according to new research.

The researchers could not find a definitive evidence of foresightful behaviour by other species.

In order to answer the question whether animals were capable of mental time travel, the researchers went by published experimental studies and matched the results with their own model.

''Some animals indeed appear to possess episodic memory. There is, however, no evidence that they are able to construct, reflect and compare different future scenarios like humans are. We, therefore, do not believe that animals are capable of mental time travel,'' said one of the researchers Sen Cheng, professor at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.

The researchers said the ability of squirrels to store food in autumn for the winter ahead could only be interpreted not as an anticipatory activity, but rather as innate behaviour, the researchers said.

''The squirrel would hoard food even if it had been fed in the winter all its life,'' Cheng noted.
The new model they had developed suggested a new relationship between mental time travel and episodic memory - the memory of autobiographical events that can be explicitly stated.

The research team presumed that mental time travel had different components. According to Chung, component one was memory traces from episodic memory, which meant fairly accurate representations of personally experienced episodes, where each trace represented a particular experience.

The second component was the ability to construct mental scenarios, meaning dynamic representations of past or expected situations that were not isolated, rather which could be embedded into larger contexts and be reflected.

The journal Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews published the study.