Model-based animal cognition slips through the sequence bottleneck

In a recent article in TiCS, Lind and Jon-And [1] argued that the sequence memory of animals constitutes a cognitive bottleneck, the ‘sequence bottleneck’, and that mental simulations require faithful representation of sequential information. They therefore concluded that animals cannot perform mental simulations, and that behavioral and neurobiological studies suggesting otherwise are best interpreted as results of associative learning. Through examples of predictive maps, cognitive control, and active sleep, we illustrate the overwhelming evidence that mammals and birds make model-based simulations, which suggests the sequence bottleneck to be more limited in scope than proposed by Lind and Jon-And [1].