Route-planning and the comparative study of future-thinking

摘要

Research into planning in non-human animals has often focused on anticipation of future needs, with falsification of the “Bischof-Köhler hypothesis” as the gold standard. This hypothesis states that non-human animals are unable to dissociate from the present in order to consider their future drives (Suddendorf and Corballis, 1997). The Bischof-Köhler criterion is intended as a test of constructive future-thinking (or “mental time travel”), in which the future is pre-experienced in the mind's eye (Atance and O'Neill, 2001). Pre-experiencing future scenarios should, the argument goes, allow the motivational drives associated with those scenarios to influence present behavior.