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Animal Behaviour

Planning for breakfast

Nature volume 445, pages 825–826 (2007)Cite this article

It is commonly believed that planning for the future is a skill unique to humans. Could other animals, even those as evolutionarily distant as western scrub-jays, share this skill with us?

Can it ever be said that animals plan ahead? Animals do show behaviour that prepares them for the future, but in general that behaviour reflects unlearned or conditioned responses to predictive cues. For example, a swallow flying south or a marmot entering hibernation is reacting to a cue that has foretold the seasons for its ancestors. A hungry rat pressing a lever that provides food in ten seconds, rather than a lever providing food later, does so because rewards are more effective after short than after long delays. Two requirements1 for genuine future planning are that the behaviour involved should be a novel action, or combination of actions (thus ruling out migrating and hibernating), and that it should be appropriate to a motivational state other than the one the animal is in at that moment (thus ruling out the rat's lever pressing). In their report of two experiments with western scrub-jays (page 919 of this issue2), Raby et al. describe the first observations that unambiguously fulfil both requirements.

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Figure 1: Food for thought.

R. WILSON/ALAMY

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sara J. Shettleworth is in the Departments of Psychology and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto M5S 3G3, Canada. shettle@psych.utoronto.ca,

    Sara J. Shettleworth

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  1. Sara J. Shettleworth
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Shettleworth, S. Planning for breakfast. Nature 445, 825–826 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/445825a

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