Does metarepresentation make human mental time travel unique?

Abstract

The author has declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

Children’s and Apes’ Preparatory Responses to Two Mutually Exclusive Possibilities

“…Adult humans are particularly adept at dealing with environmental uncertainty, being able to mentally represent multiple, even mutually exclusive versions of the future and prepare accordingly. This capacity is fundamental to many complex future-oriented behaviors [6,7], yet little is known about when it develops in children [8] and whether it is shared with non-human animals [9]. Here we show that children become able to insightfully prepare for two mutually exclusive versions of an undetermined future event during the middle preschool years, whereas we find no evidence for such a capacity in a sample of chimpanzees and orangutans.…”

“…This would suggest that a new cognitive ability for dealing with environmental uncertainty evolved after the split of the human and chimpanzee lineages approximately 6-8 million years ago [26]. Our study therefore contributes a new perspective to the ongoing debate about what, if anything, is unique to human foresight [7,9,[27][28][29][30] and cognition more generally [20,31].…”

“…One fundamental component is the capacity to form metarepresentations, which allow an agent to reflect on the relationship between their representation of a given event and the event itself [9,18,19]. An effective way to solve our task, for instance, would be to reflect on a representation of the item coming out of one bottom opening of the tube, to recognize that this representation could be incorrect (i.e., to metarepresent), and thus to simultaneously prepare for this possibility as well as for the alternative by covering both openings.…”

Episodic foresight and anxiety: Proximate and ultimate perspectives

“…With the emergence of mental time travel, humans acquired the capacity to exhibit anxious responses in a wider variety of situations and for more extended time frames. This may constitute a critical divide between human and non‐human animals: Whereas many organisms are capable of responding to imminent or potential threats (through fear or anxiety, respectively), only humans have heretofore demonstrated an additional capacity to trigger and sustain anxiety in response to self‐generated episodic mental simulations (Suddendorf & Corballis, ; but see also Cheke & Clayton, ; Corballis, ,b; Suddendorf, ; Redshaw, ). The ability to steer present behaviour away from possible disaster that as of yet has no analogue in the immediate environment confers a self‐evident benefit (Suddendorf & Corballis, ).…”

The History and Future of Human Prospection

“…In STF, Suddendorf et al argue that people can deliberately pursue specialization only by identifying a future skillset (and the path towards its acquirement), and that this deliberate pursuit goes some way toward explaining the powerful diversity of expertise that characterises humanity. Metacognition underpins such adaptive foresight in humans: one can only overcome one's cognitive limits by recognising those limits-recognizing, for instance that one lacks a certain skill, or that one's predictions could be wrong (Redshaw 2014;Redshaw and Bulley 2018).…”