Human imagination is a complex, rich and highly developed cognitive ability, constituting an important part of human experience. Nevertheless, imagination is critically understudied as such, with little systematic research addressing it directly. Approaching imagination from an evolutionary perspective, this research will address the following questions: how could such an ability evolve? Is imagination uniquely human, or is this ability more widespread across the animal kingdom? And finally, what would be the best way to approach such scientifically and philosophically difficult questions?

The aim of this project is to develop a comprehensive and coherent framework of imagination that brings together findings from the fields of animal cognition, comparative neuroscience, and philosophy. The thesis as a whole will interrogate the neural structures that enable imagination and trace their development throughout vertebrate evolution. The project that will be the focus of the fellowship is comprised of an in-depth comparative study of reptilian and mammalian brains. A central hypothesis leading this study is that the specialization of the hippocampus and neocortex in the base of the mammalian lineage led to the evolution of imaginative consciousness, as they both underwent extensive expansion and reorganization in mammalian ancestors.

An important contribution of this project will be to organize findings across vertebrate species and present a coherent, multi-level comparison of their brains. An additional contribution will be to discuss the computational capabilities attributed to mammalian brains. These are central in describing the neural basis of imaginative abilities, and there is little consideration in the literature of how they developed and how they differ (qualitatively or quantitatively) from the computational abilities of other vertebrate lineages (such as reptiles). A better understanding can emerge from considerations of which features are indeed uniquely mammalian, including plausible accounts of how these features evolved through developmental modifications and in response to ecological shifts. I believe significant progress can be made in providing a scientifically based, and philosophically tractable, description of animal imagination and its evolution.