Michael J. Beran
Department of Psychology and Language Research Center
Georgia State University

Do nonhuman animals remember their past and anticipate their future?  This question has featured prominently in comparative cognition research.  I will discuss two areas of research with nonhuman primates that may reflect a future-oriented perspective in those species:  self-control behavior and prospective memory.  Self-control occurs when an individual waits to obtain an objectively more valuable outcome rather than taking a less valuable outcome more immediately.  Nonhuman primates and other animals show varying degrees of self-control, suggesting that they may anticipate future rewards and may even structure present behavior in ways that help them obtain those future rewards. Prospective memory involves forming future intentions, encoding those intentions, and then retrieving and activating those intentions at the correct time.  Chimpanzees show evidence of this type of future-oriented process in a variety of tasks. Both areas of research converge on the idea that other species show evidence of future-oriented cognitive processes that are likely relevant to mental time travel.