In order to survive and reproduce animals need to acquire and respond to information from their environment. The ability of organisms to learn, represent and use temporal information is critical for most major cognitive processes and for adaptive behaviour. Examples of these are the ability to detect contingency between events, which is essential to exploit the relation between cause and effect or knowing when to select and perform the right set of actions at the appropriate time. In a series of example studies with mammals, birds and fish I will show how offering animals choices, under systematic variations of their environment’s temporal contingencies, while looking at their responses and/or movement profiles, can provide unexplored opportunities to investigate behaviour and tap into animals’ cognitive capabilities.