Fellow travellers: Working memory and mental time travel in rodents.
The impairment of mental time travel is a severe cognitive symptom in patients with brain lesions and a number of neuropsychiatric disorders. Whether animals are also able to mentally travel in time both forward and backward is still a matter of debate. In this regard, we have proposed a continuum of mental time travel abilities across different animal species, with humans being the species with the ability to perform most sophisticated forms of mental time travel. In this review and perspective article, we delineate a novel approach to understand the evolution, characteristics and function of human and animal mental time travel. Furthermore, we propose a novel approach to measure mental time travel in rodents in a comprehensive manner using a test battery composed of well-validated and easy applicable tests.
Teaching and Research Unit Life Sciences (927), University Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris, France; Clinical Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine, Göttingen, Germany. Electronic address: Ekrem.Dere@upmc.fr.
Ekrem
E
Dere
Georg Elias Müller Institute of Psychology, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Georg August University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
Dorothea
D
Dere
Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, Institute of Experimental Psychology, University of Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Maria Angelica
MA
de Souza Silva
Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, Institute of Experimental Psychology, University of Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Joseph P
JP
Huston
Department of Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
Armin
A
Zlomuzica
D000818:Animals; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011581:Psychological Tests; D012377:Rodentia; D013998:Time Perception
Animal model of mental time travel; Episodic memory; Evolution of mental time travel; Prospective memory; Temporal order memory; Translational psychiatry