Scrub-jays plan for the future
A recent paper in Nature, which came out of Nicky Clayton’s lab at the University of Cambridge, reports on the ability of western scrub-jays to plan for the future. The findings of this paper, by Raby et al., suggest that scrub-jays can (and do!) plan for the following day without reference to their current motivational state, challenging the idea that the ability to think about the future is unique to humans. It will be interesting to see what kind evidence will follow on this topic.
Adding to the recent surge of studies on future thinking, 
When thinking about the future or the upcoming actions of another person, we mentally project ourselves into that alternative situation. Accumulating data suggest that envisioning the future (prospection), remembering the past, conceiving the viewpoint of others (theory of mind) and possibly some forms of navigation reflect the workings of the same core brain network. These abilities emerge at a similar age and share a common functional anatomy that includes frontal and medial temporal systems that are traditionally associated with planning, episodic memory and default (passive) cognitive states. We speculate that these abilities, most often studied as distinct, rely on a common set of processes by which past experiences are used adaptively to imagine perspectives and events beyond those that emerge from the immediate environment.
