Question: If a human has the ability to imagine an event in their mind whenever they want, do animals and insects have the same ability to do so?

Sophie Holles answered on 19 Mar 2013:

A difficult question to answer! Well they’ve done an experiment on scrub jays that shows they have theory of mind.. they gave a scrub jay some nuts in a room where it could bury them where it wanted. Then they allowed some other scrub jays to watch from a window. The focal scrub jay didn’t change where it buried the nuts so the watchers could see where it hid them. But if they allowed the focal scrub jay to see the room from the observatory behind the window then they repeated the experiment, the focal scrub jay would only bury the nuts in places in the room it knew couldn’t be seen from that window. So the scrub jay could imagine the perspective of the birds that were watching.

We don’t know if all animals have this cognitive ability yet, but we are often surprised to find out what they’re capable of.. eg that ants can teach each other, that macaques have culture (they’ve passed down the tradition of washing potatoes so they don’t have sand on them).