The meaning of “time” in episodic memory and mental time travel

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Temporal Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Anticipation Time

AbstractThe role of time in episodic memory and mental time travel is considered in light of findings on humans' temporal memory and anticipation. Time is not integral or uniform in memory for the past or anticipation of the future. The commonalities of episodic memory and anticipation require further study.

scholarly journals No evidence for future planning in Canada jays ( Perisoreus canadensis )

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Jeffrey Martin ◽  
Glynis K. Martin ◽  
William A. Roberts ◽  
David F. Sherry
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Animal Cognition ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Future Planning ◽  
The Past ◽  
Perisoreus Canadensis ◽  
The Future ◽  
Complex Cognition

In the past 20 years, research in animal cognition has challenged the belief that complex cognitive processes are uniquely human. At the forefront of these challenges has been research on mental time travel and future planning in jays. We tested whether Canada jays ( Perisoreus canadensis ) demonstrated future planning, using a procedure that has produced evidence of future planning in California scrub-jays. Future planning in this procedure is caching in locations where the bird will predictably experience a lack of food in the future. Canada jays showed no evidence of future planning in this sense and instead cached in the location where food was usually available, opposite to the behaviour described for California scrub-jays. We provide potential explanations for these differing results adding to the recent debates about the role of complex cognition in corvid caching strategies.

scholarly journals An asymmetry in past and future mental time travel following vmPFC damage

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Ciaramelli ◽  
Filomena Anelli ◽  
Francesca Frassinetti
Keyword(s):  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Subjective Time ◽  
Healthy Controls ◽  
Focal Lesions ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Self Reference

Abstract The role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in mental time travel toward the past and the future is debated. Here, patients with focal lesions to the vmPFC and brain-damaged and healthy controls mentally projected themselves to a past, present or future moment of subjective time (self-projection) and classified a series of events as past or future relative to the adopted temporal self-location (self-reference). We found that vmPFC patients were selectively impaired in projecting themselves to the future and in recognizing relative-future events. These findings indicate that vmPFC damage hinders the mental processing of and movement toward future events, pointing to a prominent, multifaceted role of vmPFC in future-oriented mental time travel.

scholarly journals Is mental time travel real time travel?

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Michael Barkasi ◽  
Melanie G. Rosen
Keyword(s):  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Direct Realism ◽  
Similar Argument ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events

Episodic memory (memories of the personal past) and prospecting the future (anticipating events) are often described as mental time travel (MTT). While most use this description metaphorically, we argue that episodic memory may allow for MTT in at least some robust sense. While episodic memory experiences may not allow us to literally travel through time, they do afford genuine awareness of past-perceived events. This is in contrast to an alternative view on which episodic memory experiences present past-perceived events as mere intentional contents. Hence, episodic memory is a way of coming into experiential contact with, or being again aware of, what happened in the past. We argue that episodic memory experiences depend on a causal-informational link with the past events being remembered, and that, assuming direct realism about episodic memory experiences, this link suffices for genuine awareness. Since there is no such link in future prospection, a similar argument cannot be used to show that it also affords genuine awareness of future events. Constructivist views of memory might challenge the idea of memory as genuine awareness of remembered events. We explain how our view is consistent with both constructivist and anti-causalist conceptions of memory. There is still room for an interpretation of episodic memory as enabling genuine awareness of past events, even if it involves reconstruction.

Mental time travel? A neurocognitive model of event simulation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Rose Addis
Keyword(s):  
Predictive Coding ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Simulation System ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Event Representation ◽  
Conceptual Information ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
General Capacity

Mental time travel (MTT) is defined as projecting the self into the past and the future. Despite growing evidence of the similarities of remembering past and imagining future events, dominant theories conceive of these as distinct capacities. I propose that memory and imagination are fundamentally the same process – constructive episodic simulation – and demonstrate that the ‘simulation system’ meets the three criteria of a neurocognitive system. Irrespective of whether one is remembering or imagining, the simulation system: (1) acts on the same information, drawing on elements of experience ranging from fine-grained perceptual details to coarser-grained conceptual information and schemas about the world; (2) is governed by the same rules of operation, including associative processes that facilitate construction of a schematic scaffold, the event representation itself, and the dynamic interplay between the two (cf. predictive coding); and (3) is subserved by the same brain system. I also propose that by forming associations between schemas, the simulation system constructs multi-dimensional cognitive spaces, within which any given simulation is mapped by the hippocampus. Finally, I suggest that simulation is a general capacity that underpins other domains of cognition, such as the perception of ongoing experience. This proposal has some important implications for the construct of ‘MTT’, suggesting that ‘time’ and ‘travel’ may not be defining, or even essential, features. Rather, it is the ‘mental’ rendering of experience that is the most fundamental function of this simulation system, enabling humans to re-experience the past, pre-experience the future, and also comprehend the complexities of the present.

scholarly journals The Ape That Lived to Tell the Tale. The Evolution of the Art of Storytelling and Its Relationship to Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elias Garcia-Pelegrin ◽  
Clive Wilkins ◽  
Nicola S. Clayton
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
The Self ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Present Condition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Future ◽  
Past Experiences

Engaging in the art of creating and telling stories is a defining behaviour of humankind. Humans have been sharing stories with each other, with and without words, since the dawn of recorded history, but the cognitive foundations of the behaviour can be traced deeper into our past. The emergence of stories can be strongly linked to Mental Time Travel (the ability to recall the past and imagine the future) and plays a key role in our ability to communicate past, present and future scenarios with other individuals, within and beyond our lifetimes. Stories are products engraved within the concept of time, constructed to elucidate the past experiences of the self, but designed with the future in mind, thus imparting lessons of such experiences to the receiver. By being privy to the experiences of others, humans can imagine themselves in a similar position to the protagonist of the story, thus mentally learning from an experience they might have never encountered other than in the mind's eye. Evolutionary Psychology investigates how the engagement in artistic endeavours by our ancestors in the Pleistocene granted them an advantage when confronted with obstacles that challenged their survival or reproductive fitness and questions whether art is an adaptation of the human mind or a spandrel of other cognitive adaptations. However, little attention has been placed on the cognitive abilities that might have been imperative for the development of art. Here, we examine the relationship between art, storytelling, Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind (i.e., the ability to attribute mental states to others). We suggest that Mental Time Travel played a key role in the development of storytelling because through stories, humans can fundamentally transcend their present condition, by being able to imagine different times, separate realities, and place themselves and others anywhere within the time space continuum. We argue that the development of a Theory of Mind also sparked storytelling practises in humans as a method of diffusing the past experiences of the self to others whilst enabling the receiver to dissociate between the past experiences of others and their own, and to understand them as lessons for a possible future. We propose that when artistic products rely on storytelling in form and function, they ought to be considered separate from other forms of art whose appreciation capitalise on our aesthetic preferences.

The Role of Past in the Simulation of Autobiographical Future Episodes

2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (6) ◽  
pp. 419-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Gamboz ◽  
Maria A. Brandimonte ◽  
Stefania De Vito
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Recognition Task ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Delayed Recognition

Human beings’ ability to envisage the future has been recently assumed to rely on the reconstructive nature of episodic memory ( Schacter & Addis, 2007 ). In the present research, young adults mentally reexperienced and preexperienced temporally close and distant autobiographical episodes, and rated their phenomenal characteristics as well as their novelty. Additionally, they performed a delayed recognition task including remember-know judgments on new, old-remember, and old-imagine words. Results showed that past and future temporally close episodes included more phenomenal details than distant episodes, in line with earlier studies. However, future events were occasionally rated as already occurred in the past. Furthermore, in the recognition task, participants falsely attributed old-imagine words to remembered episodes. While partially in line with previous results, these findings call for a more subtle analysis in order to discriminate representations of past episodes from true future events simulations.

Collective mental time travel: remembering the past and imagining the future together

Synthese ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 196 (12) ◽  
pp. 4933-4960 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kourken Michaelian ◽  
John Sutton
Keyword(s):  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

The medium and the message of mental time travel

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Endel Tulving ◽  
Alice Kim
Keyword(s):  
Time Travel ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Conscious Awareness ◽  
The Past ◽  
Future Success ◽  
Fundamental Distinction ◽  
The Future ◽  
The One

AbstractWe add one point to Suddendorf & Corballis's (S&C's) story of mental time travel: For the future success of this hot, new area of research, it is imperative to pay attention to the fundamental distinction between the general brain/mind capacity that makes possible conscious awareness of the past and the future (the “medium”), on the one hand, and specific expressions of this capacity in a large variety of future-related mental activities (the “message”), on the other.

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