Using time, choice and movement as windows into cognition (across species)

In order to survive and reproduce animals need to acquire and respond to information from their environment. When compared to how much is known about how animals deal with spatial information, how they deal with time is far less well understood. The ability of organisms to learn, represent and use temporal information is critical for most major cognitive processes and for adaptive behaviour. Examples of these are the ability to detect contingency between events, which is essential to exploit the relation between cause and effect, or knowing when to select and perform the right set of actions at the appropriate time. In a series of example studies with birds, mammals and fish I will show how offering animals choices, under systematic (and experimentally controlled) variations of their environment’s temporal contingencies, while looking at their choice behaviour and/or movement profiles, can provide unexplored opportunities to investigate behaviour and tap into animals’ cognitive capabilities.