New paper explores how animals experience time: a new “timescapes” framework
In the interests of developing scientific approaches to the study of animal minds, Jonathan Birch co-authors a new paper with Ishan Singhal and Anil K. Seth: “Timescapes of non-human experience”, recently published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
How do other animals experience the world, moment by moment? With many sensory inputs arriving at once, how are these combined into a single ‘moment’ of experience? And how - and how often - is that moment updated as things change?
The authors address these questions by proposing a framework for understanding the temporal structure of experience, or “timescapes”: the characteristic ways in which perceptual content is organised, integrated, and revised over time.
Bringing together a range of experimental approaches - including perceptual illusions - the paper explores how perception and attention unfold across species, and sets out a strategy for comparing these patterns systematically. The image above, taken from the paper, illustrates distinct aspects of a “timescape”.
The result is a new way of framing differences in how animals experience the world over time.
An important contribution to the emerging science of animal minds, the paper supports a more informed understanding of how different species experience the world.