ABSTRACT
Henri Bergson's remark about "the power to value the useless" was perhaps not meant entirely literally. It can more plausibly be seen as a rhetorical device aimed at drawing attention to a key issue in the background of the question as to whether animals have episodic memories—the question of the function of episodic memory. It is a series of studies on scrub jays carried out by Nicola Clayton and her colleagues that is largely responsible for the recent surge of interest in the question as to whether animals have episodic memories. Episodic memory can be seen as one manifestation of such event-independent thought about times, insofar as it involves the ability to retain information about events that are no longer part of one's environment specifically by cognitively placing those events at other times. One relevant line of research concerns the question as to whether animals can experience regret.
