Roberts William A, Feeney Miranda C
Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5C2, Canada.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2009 Jun;13(6):271-7. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2009.03.003. Epub 2009 May 15.
People regularly travel through time mentally to remember and reconstruct past events and to anticipate and plan future events. We suggest that a bi-cone structure best describes human mental time travel (MTT) abilities. Experiments with scrub-jays, rats and non-human primates have investigated whether MTT is uniquely human by examining the abilities of these animals to remember what, where and when an event occurred and to anticipate future events. We argue that animal memory for when an event happened must be distinguished from memory for how long ago it happened to properly evaluate parallels with human capabilities. Similarly, tests of future MTT in animals must show that they are planning for a specific time in the future to demonstrate qualitative comparability with human MTT.
人们经常在脑海中穿越时间，去回忆和重构过去的事件，并预测和规划未来的事件。我们认为，双锥结构最能描述人类的心理时间旅行（MTT）能力。对灌丛鸦、大鼠和非人类灵长类动物进行的实验，通过研究这些动物记住事件发生的内容、地点和时间以及预测未来事件的能力，来探究心理时间旅行是否是人类独有的。我们认为，必须将动物对事件发生时间的记忆与对事件发生多久之前的记忆区分开来，以便正确评估与人类能力的相似之处。同样，对动物未来心理时间旅行的测试必须表明，它们是在为未来的特定时间做规划，以证明与人类心理时间旅行在性质上具有可比性。
