18th January: Angelica Kaufmann (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) – “Do Animals Represent the Passage of Time?”
Sala “Enzo Paci”, Via Festa del Perdono 7, h. 15:00-17:00.
Abstract: When we act we act in time. The talk is about what it means to appreciate this statement. I shall present current work that aim at framing the computational structure that nonhuman animals deploy in the cognitive processing of temporal properties. Various creatures, human beings along with many other species, are capable of producing and expressing complex intentional structures. Behavioral manifestations of such complex structures suggest that such creatures possess temporal understanding (Hoerl & McCormack, 2011). That is, such creatures seem able to represent temporal properties such as duration, succession of events, causal links between events, and to represent time as passing. Representing time as passing is an essential component in action planning. Thus, providing an account of how some species represents time is a crucial component in any investigation of their capacity for action planning. Nonetheless, discussion of the nature of temporal understanding, of temporal representation, and how it is incorporated within action planning, is still at its infancy, both within such sciences as cognitive and comparative psychology and within the philosophy of action.
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Project: CARIPLO 2015-0746 – TEMPFRAME (CUP: G45F15000050007)