Anticipation occurs on timescales ranging from milliseconds to hours to days. This paper relates the theoretical and methodological developments in the study of interval timing in the seconds, minutes and hours range to research on the anticipatory activity induced by regularly timed daily meals. Daily food anticipatory activity (FAA) is entrained by procedures which are formally identical to procedures studied in Pavlovian and Operant conditioning except for the long duration of the interval between feeding opportunities. As in FAA, the conditioning procedures induce orderly anticipatory activity in advance of food presentation. During the interval between foods the behaviors that express anticipation change as the interval progresses. Consequently, no single response represents a pure measure of anticipation. The ability to distinguish between properties of general anticipatory timing mechanisms such as the scalar property (Gibbon, 1977) and dynamic properties of specific response output systems has been facilitated by teaching animals to use arbitrary anticipatory responses like bar pressing to obtain food. Interval timing research highlights the importance of identifying the mechanisms of perception, memory, decision making and motivation that all contribute to food anticipation. We suggest that future work focused on the similarities and differences in the neural bases of FAA and interval timing may be useful in unravelling the mechanisms mediating timing behavior.

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The Novel Object Recognition task (NOR) is widely used to study vertebrates' memory. It has been proposed as an adequate model for studying memory in different taxonomic groups, allowing similar and comparable results. Although in cephalopods, several research reports could indicate that they recognize objects in their environment, it has not been tested as an experimental paradigm that allows studying different memory phases. This study shows that two-month-old and older Octopus maya subjects can differentiate between a new object and a known one, but one-month-old subjects cannot. Furthermore, we observed that octopuses use vision and tactile exploration of new objects to achieve object recognition, while familiar objects only need to be explored visually. To our knowledge, this is the first time showing an invertebrate performing the NOR task similarly to how it is performed in vertebrates. These results establish a guide to studying object recognition memory in octopuses and the ontological development of that memory.

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