Ok. No one is suggesting animals keeping markations of time such as "June" or "10 o'clock". Time exists no matter how you mark it and for this discussion we'll consider it to be an extension of context. Things happen relative to other things.

FTA: "rats are able to keep track of how much time has passed since they discovered a piece of cheese, be it a little or a lot, but they don’t actually form memories of when the discovery occurred. That is, the rats can’t place the memories in time."

That's not terrifically clear but I'll try to delineate and clarify--

When we think about time and events (say, discovering some cheese) we place it into context with other events forming a sort of flowing recollection or memoir. Think of when you lost your keys last and you retraced your steps.

Rats, on the other hand, merely recall that something happened and that it was a span of time ago, perhaps categorically (a little while ago, a long while ago), but don't put those memories together into the complete tapestry that we do. They simply remember the event and a 'time ID' --how categorically long ago it happened.

Now, that may sound like the same thing, ie, since all remembered events have time IDs associated with them, logically one could reconstruct a flow of time from memory-- but rats don't do that second step. They stop at the individual memories.

However, rats are pretty damned smart and can learn quickly. I'm curious how the perception of time, recollection of events, and learning of behaviors are related and I'd love to be able to ask the authors to clarify.

You're right, but this really isn't a difference between animals and people as much as between those who are slaves of civilization and those who are not. I live in a place where people are nearly as "free of time" in your sense as animals... a small town in the tropics where people only work if they want to, electricity only arrived 15 years ago, and many people aren't sure exactly how old they are.

It isn't paradise... freedom always has a price. But I think it shows that the "trap" you speak of is not intelligence per se (uneducated does not mean stupid), but the structures of complex civilization.

Maybe it's the same with animals. Maybe we /could/ train rats (or some more intelligent creatures) to live by an absolute calendar and develop a sense of "when".

:j

Uh, sure, but I don't need to run rats in a maze to know that they don't have calendars.

:j

Thanks, your explanation does illuminate things.

Goes to show, however, how bad some of the journalistic reports of scientific research are... in popular language we don't make that distinction between 'when' and 'how long ago' (i.e. to the question "when did you arrive?" "10 minutes ago" is as correct and answer as "at 7 o'clock" or "10 minutes after sunset"), yet the article gives no clue about what they meant by "when" and "specific point in time".

:j

I've only been around here a few weeks, but I have been given to understand that Scienceblogs is absolutely opposed to doy. All of my entries and comments are absolutely without doy. I hope that you are no longer astounded.

It's always astounding to me how many "no doy" entries they put up on this site.

...Animals are "free of time". They have the ability, if I'm reading this correctly, to know that things happened in the past or might happen in the future (hence, taking the path that the cheese might be on, inductively reasoned), and they know the difference between "just now", "a while ago" and "way long ago". They may even be able to tell, based on the strength of the memory, how long ago something happened, relative to their own internal time-frame. But they're not tied to artificial numbers and measurements like we are. They don't feel intimidated when they turn forty (or five, as the case may be), hate Mondays, or dread doing certain tasks before ten a.m. And our proclivity to think this way is largely artificial, largely a trap created by our own intelligence and specificity when it comes to "time". Many people spend much of their lives trying to get OUT of their preconceived measurements of time, whereas it seems that animals (rats, at least), can do what we often find impossible -- Live "in the now" while still retaining the useful parts of time-sense.

Just another view -- not a scientific one, I realize, but I (a philosopher) thought it was interesting. ;)

Thanks for the great blog!

don't get me wrong, but i don't see the animal kingdom making up names like "July" and "fortnight."

time is, essentially, a human construct...

First a small disclaimer: I haven't read the article that is discussed above, so my reponse is solely based on past experience in the field of behavioural biology.

The important thing with 'when' is that a point in time in reference to a 'fixed' context. In your example the context is the calendar and the time of day. Because many animals display seasonal and diurnal cycles in hormone levels and behaviour, it could be possible that they also have a 'sense of time' irrespective of 'how long ago' but simple compared to the context (e.g. 5 hours past sun rise).

With respect to the second part, I think 'stuck in time' refers to the fact that they lack the ability to solely use context to place an event is time, and always have to relate everything to the 'now' (hence the 'stuck in time' analogy).

Ok, maybe I have a rat-brain, because I don't seem to be clear on the difference between "when" and "how long ago". I mean, if we were talking about humans, then I would say "when" refers to labeling a memory with something like "1st Friday or March, 6am", but I don't need to run rats in a maze to know that they can't do that. So what kind of "when" /could/ we have expected rats to maybe use?

Furthermore, to me the two statements: "The rats remember whether they did something, such as hoarded food a few hours or five days ago” and "[they] are stuck in time, with no sense of time extending into the past or future” are contradictory. "Five days ago" is not a sense of time?

Can someone help me out here?

:j