The researchers used the response time to critical flicker fusion, the lowest frequency of flashing light, to gain a sense of how fast or slow animals perceived the flashes.
As the researchers had theorized, CFF processing was faster in those with speedy metabolisms and slower in heavier animals.
This conclusion loops back to the idea that larger animals need to move around less, so possessing the ability to process time faster is unnecessary. There’s no need to devote energy to something that isn’t vital to their survival.
Then, the response times were compared to the metabolic rate and body mass of the animals to see if there was a correlation between time perception, metabolism, and body weight.
“We’ll never be able to get inside another animal’s head and feel what it’s like for them to experience a day,” said SciShow host Olivia Gordon. “But whether that day is a blip or an eternity probably has something to do with how they process sensory information.”
Do dogs have a sense of time?
“It’s hard to say how dogs experience time,” Chyrle Bonk, a veterinary consultant at PetKeen, tells Inverse.
If you’re a dog owner, you may have heard a myth tossed around that canines lack a sense of time. According to this myth, there is little cognitive difference for them between, say, two minutes and two hours.
In this sense, Yui Shapard, a small-animal veterinarian and educational director of the Association of Asian Veterinary Medical Professionals, states that one minute of pain can feel like “forever” for a dog.
“In a similar sense, when their humans leave them at home even for 30 minutes or three hours, to the dog it doesnt matter the length of time,” she says. And “because dogs do not have a clear concept of time the way we humans do, they are always ‘living in the moment.’”
This common belief leads veterinarians to strongly advocate for quality of life, including, for example, pain relief for dogs during surgical procedures, she explains.
But not all veterinarians and animal behavior scientists agree that dogs have no sense of time. In fact, Katherine Pankratz, a board-certified veterinary behaviorist, believes the idea is actually somewhat of a misconception. “They do have a grasp of time intervals and the differences between a short duration and a long duration.”
Some dog owners would probably agree. After all, it’s not uncommon for dogs to wake up and wait by the door or window not long before their human comes home.
Scientific research also lends support to dogs understanding the difference between varying chunks of time.
A 2011 study found dogs “are affected by the duration of time at home alone,” even if the researchers could not confirm if the dogs were aware of the length of time they were left alone.
But it gets trickier when we compare the general sense of time in a dog’s mind to our precisely calculated human clocks. As Pankratz notes, we can’t really ask them if they understand time as we comprehend it.
Sources
Can dogs tell the time? | Inside the Animal Mind – BBC
Can our furry friends comprehend the passage of time in the same way humans can? This perplexing question has long stumped canine cognition researchers and veterinarians, but recent research may finally be close to an answer — and it may even help pet owners better understand their pups.