Science chats with a researcher whose team is using “timescapes” to understand how nonhumans experience the world – Do torpid tortoises experience the world whizzing by? Do flitting flies avoid swatters because they see things in slow motion? Scientists have long wondered how animals perceive time, but the phenomenon has been tricky to study.
Enter the “timescape.” In a review published today in Trends in Cognitive Science, researchers propose a new framework to study how animals perceive the temporal world around them. Science spoke with the lead author of the review, Ishan Singhal, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sussex, to learn how timescapes can help us better understand animal consciousness. This interview has been edited for clarity and length…
Science Magazine
- Problems in 22 scientific fields had solutions hiding in plain sight. An AI has found them
- U.S. crop genome sequencing gets $180 million boost
- Department of Energy expands ‘Genesis Mission’ to boost AI, awarding larger grants
- Major employer of archaeologists shuts down, leaving workers in the lurch
- NIH revives network to study emerging diseases—but its new restrictions baffle scientists
- NIH ends 2026 with a boost for early-career researchers, but new awards are down overall
- Will the world end next month? <cite>Science</cite> said so, in 1960
- Two teams map development of mammal embryos, cell by cell
- Audacious space heist aims to bring home bits of mysterious martian moon
- Watch: What’s the deal with OpenAI’s massive dump of math papers?
Science Magazine Podcast
- A moon heist, lava fountains, and predicting doomsday
- Stimulating the brain for women’s health, and the long-term implications of menopausal symptoms
- Studying the changing of AI language inside swarms, how orangutans learn to forage, and an astrophysicist talks about loss
- Can ‘assisted migration’ save forests? And the role of philosophy in science
- Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization, and breaking barriers to education
JOURNALS
Science | Science Advances | Science Immunology | Science RoboticsScience Signaling | Science Translational Medicine | Science Partner Journals
