Questions 1-11 are based on the following
passage.
Passage 1 is excerpted from Linden Miles, "The Meandering Mind: Vection and Mental Time Travel," ©2010 by Linden Miles. Passage 2 is excerpted from Justin Gregg, "A New Frontier in Animal Intelligence," ©2013 by Scientific American.
Passage 1
The ability to travel mentally through time sets humans
apart from many other species, yet little is known about
this core cognitive capacity. In particular, what shapes the
passage of the mind's journey through time?
5 A core facet of conscious experience is that one's mind
periodically wanders from the here-and-now. From
memories of lost loves to expectations about forthcoming
vacations, mental time travel (MTT) makes it possible to
revisit the past and pre-experience the future. Present
10 across cultures and emerging early in childhood, MTT is
believed to serve a pivotal function in human cognition.
When confronted with complex and challenging
judgments, simulating future outcomes (i.e., prospection)
on the basis of prior experience (i.e., retrospection) is a
15 tactic that optimizes decision-making and behavioral
selection. That the past informs the future in this way (i.e.,
recollection-guides-simulation) is evidenced from research
demonstrating that retrospection and prospection rely on
largely overlapping neural structures and cognitive
20 operations.
However, remarkably little is known about the actual
process of MTT and how it impacts people's behavior. In
this respect, one emerging possibility is that MTT may be
represented in the sensory-motor systems that regulate
25 human movement (i.e., MTT is embodied). Put simply,
traveling mentally in time may initiate associated bodily
movements through space. Initial evidence for such a
thought-action coupling during MTT was reported in a
study in which spontaneous fluctuations in the direction
30 and magnitude of postural sway were assessed while
participants engaged in either retrospective or prospective
mental imagery. The results revealed that the temporal
locus of MTT did indeed influence the direction of people's
movements — whereas retrospection was accompanied by
35 significant backwards sway, prospection yielded postural
movement in an anterior direction.
Passage 2
Santino was a misanthrope with a habit of pelting
tourists with rocks. As his reputation for mischief grew, he
had to devise increasingly clever ways to ambush his wary
victims. Santino learned to stash his rocks just out of sight
41 and casually stand just a few feet from them in order to
throw off suspicion. At the very moment that passersby
were fooled into thinking that he meant them no harm, he
grabbed his hidden projectiles and launched his attack.
Santino, you see, is not human. He’s a chimpanzee at
46 Furuvik Zoo in Sweden. His crafty stone-throwing
escapades have made him a global celebrity, and also
caught the attention of researchers studying how animals,
much like humans, might be able to plan their behavior.
Santino is one of a handful of animals that scientists
51 believe are showing a complex cognitive ability called
episodic memory. Episodic memory is the ability to recall
past events that one has the sense of having personally
experienced. Unlike semantic memory, which involves
recalling simple facts like “bee stings hurt,” episodic
56 memory involves putting yourself at the heart of the
memory; like remembering the time you swatted at a bee
with a rolled up newspaper and it got angry and stung your
hand.
If an animal can imagine itself interacting with the
61 world in the past via episodic memory – like Santino
recalling a failed attack when a human spotted him holding
a rock, or you remembering swatting at a bee – it stands to
reason that the animal might also be able to imagine itself
in the future in a similar scenario, and thus plan its
66 behavior. Santino might opt to hide his rocks, and you
might decide to stop antagonizing bees. The ability to
represent oneself and one’s actions in the mind’s eye – both
in the past [and] in the future – is what scientists refer to as
“mental time travel.”