Everyday Thoughts in Time: Experience Sampling Studies of Mental Time Travel (original) (raw)
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Our overriding hypothesis was that future thinking would be linked with goals to a greater extent than memories; conceptualising goals as current concerns (i.e., uncompleted personal goals; Klinger, 1975). We also hypothesised that current concern-related events would differ from non-current concern-related events on a set of phenomenological characteristics. We report novel data from a study examining involuntary and voluntary mental time travel using an adapted laboratory paradigm. Specifically, after autobiographical memories or future thoughts were elicited (between participants) in an involuntary and voluntary retrieval mode (within participants), participants self-generated five current concerns and decided whether each event was relevant or not to their current concerns. Consistent with our hypothesis, compared with memories, a larger percentage of involuntary and voluntary future thoughts reflected current concerns. Furthermore, events related to current concerns differed from non-concern-related events on a range of cognitive, representational and affective phenomenological measures. These effects were consistent across temporal direction. In general, our results agree with the proposition that involuntary and voluntary future thinking is important for goal-directed cognition and behaviour.
Synthese, 2019
Bringing research on collective memory together with research on episodic future thought, Szpunar and Szpunar (Mem Stud 9(4):376–389, 2016) have recently developed the concept of collective future thought. Individual memory and individual future thought are increasingly seen as two forms of individual mental time travel, and it is natural to see collective memory and collective future thought as forms of collective mental time travel. But how seriously should the notion of collective mental time travel be taken? This article argues that, while collective mental time travel is disanalogous in important respects to individual mental time travel, the concept of collective mental time travel nevertheless provides a useful means of organizing existing findings, while also suggesting promising directions for future research.
Toward a Typology of Mental Time Travel
In this article I set out to unify and in some measure extend some of the current models of mental time travel (MTT). In the past, models have focused either purely on the mental scenes evoked through MTT (Suddendorf & Corballis 1997, 2007; Suddendorf et al. 2009) or on the conceptual mechanisms enabling MTT (Stocker 2012, 2013). I claim that these models are largely compatible and suggest how they can be combined in a ‘two-layered’ model consisting of a ‘constructional’ and a ‘conceptual’ level. I suggest that not all mental scenes can be attributed to MTT and that the difference between MTT scenes and other scenes is MTT scenes’ function of future planning. I also suggest that function is a useful criterion for distinguishing three different types of MTT, which I name ‘deictic’, ‘sequential’, and ‘extrinsic’ each making its own contribution to a phenomenon so important to what makes us human.
When Does the Future Begin? Time Metrics Matter, Connecting Present and Future Selves
Psychological science, 2015
People assume they should attend to the present; their future self can handle the future. This seemingly plausible rule of thumb can lead people astray, in part because some future events require current action. In order for the future to energize and motivate current action, it must feel imminent. To create this sense of imminence, we manipulated time metric-the units (e.g., days, years) in which time is considered. People interpret accessible time metrics in two ways: If preparation for the future is under way (Studies 1 and 2), people interpret metrics as implying when a future event will occur. If preparation is not under way (Studies 3-5), they interpret metrics as implying when preparation should start (e.g., planning to start saving 4 times sooner for a retirement in 10,950 days instead of 30 years). Time metrics mattered not because they changed how distal or important future events felt (Study 6), but because they changed how connected and congruent their current and future...
The Psychology of Time: A View Backward and Forward
The American Journal of Psychology, 2012
We selectively review the progress of research on the psychology of time during the past 125 years, starting with the publication of the first English-language psychological journal, The American Journal of Psychology. A number of important articles on the psychology of time appeared in this journal, including the widely cited early article by Nichols (1891). The psychology of time is a seminal topic of psychological science, and although it entered a phase of decline and even moribund neglect, the past several decades have seen a prominent renaissance of interest. This renewed vigor represents the rebirth of the recognition of the centrality of the psychology of time in human cognition and behavior. Our selective overview highlights a number of strands of progress and how they have helped lead to the present, in which the cognitive neuroscience of time and timing in the brain is one of the most fervent and fertile modern areas of brain research. We also discuss some remaining challenges and potential lines of progress.
The complex act of projecting oneself into the future
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2012
Research on future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT) is highly active yet somewhat unruly. I believe this is due, in large part, to the complexity of both the tasks used to test FMTT and the concepts involved. Extraordinary care is a necessity when grappling with such complex and perplexing metaphysical constructs as self and time and their co-instantiation in memory. In this review, I first discuss the relation between future mental time travel and types of memory (episodic and semantic). I then examine the nature of both the types of self-knowledge assumed to be projected into the future and the types of temporalities that constitute projective temporal experience. Finally, I argue that a person lacking episodic memory should nonetheless be able to imagine a personal future by virtue of (1) the fact that semantic, as well as episodic, memory can be self-referential, (2) autonoetic awareness is not a prerequisite for FMTT, and (3) semantic memory does, in fact, enable certain forms of personally oriented FMTT.
Spontaneous and deliberate future thinking: a dual process account
Psychological Research, 2019
In this article, we address an apparent paradox in the literature on mental time travel and mind-wandering: How is it possible that future thinking is both constructive, yet often experienced as occurring spontaneously? We identify and describe two ‘routes’ whereby episodic future thoughts are brought to consciousness, with each of the ‘routes’ being associated with separable cognitive processes and functions. Voluntary future thinking relies on controlled, deliberate and slow cognitive processing. The other, termed involuntary or spontaneous future thinking, relies on automatic processes that allows ‘fully-fledged’ episodic future thoughts to freely come to mind, often triggered by internal or external cues. To unravel the paradox, we propose that the majority of spontaneous future thoughts are ‘pre-made’ (i.e., each spontaneous future thought is a re-iteration of a previously constructed future event), and therefore based on simple, well-understood, memory processes. We also propo...
Feeling the future: prospects for a theory of implicit prospection
Biology & Philosophy, 2013
Mental time travel refers to the ability of an organism to project herself backward and forward in time, using episodic memory and imagination to simulate past and future experiences. The evolution of mental time travel gives humans a unique capacity for prospection: the ability to pre-experience the future. Discussions of mental time travel treat it as an instance of explicit prospection. We argue that implicit simulations of past and future experience can also be used as a way of gaining information about the future to shape preferences and guide behaviour. Keywords Mental time travel Á Somatic marker hypothesis Á Implicit processes Á Iowa gambling task Á Prospection In mental time travel we review past and preview future experiences. This is a crucial cognitive adaptation for humans, tied to the evolution of the prefrontal cortex, which allows us to simulate possible futures when deliberating. The concept of mental time travel understood as a distinct cognitive process with a specialised neural substrate is now supported by convergent evidence from the neurosciences of memory, imagination, planning and decision-making. As Schacter et al. put it: ''the medial temporal lobe system which has long been considered to be crucial for remembering the past might actually gain adaptive value through its ability to