Mental time travel involves remembering personal past events (i.e., episodic memory) and thinking about future ones (i.e., future thinking). Despite empirical evidence showing that animals might be capable of mental time travel, some still remain skeptical about this issue. The aim in this chapter will be to reflect on the concept of episodic memory and future thinking as well as on the experimental approaches used in comparative psychology to study these abilities. A critical analysis of both the conceptualization of mental time travel and the experimental paradigms will be provided. I will finish by questioning the extent to which the sense of past has been addressed in this type of research and by suggesting lines of future research.

Episodic memory refers to the ability to recollect personal past events, allowing mental time travel.In contrast, semantic memory has been defined as the storage of general facts about the world. The field of comparative psychology has adopted this distinction in order to study what nonhuman animals recall about their past. The aim in this chapter is to reflect on the concept of episodic memory as well as on the experimental approaches used in comparative psychology to study this ability. A critical analysis of both the conceptualization of episodic memory and the experimental paradigms is provided.