How animals experience time: a new “timescapes” framework
Contributing to the development of scientific approaches to the study of animal minds, Jonathan Birch co-authored a new review with Ishan Singhal and Anil K. Seth: "Timescapes of non-human experience", published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in June 2026. Read the paper here.
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 paper offers a new way of framing differences in how animals experience the world over time, and is an important contribution to the emerging science of animal minds.