In psychology, mental time travel is the capacity to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past (episodic memory) as well as to imagine possible scenarios in the future (episodic foresight/episodic future thinking). The term was coined by Thomas Suddendorf and Michael Corballis, building on Endel Tulving's work on episodic memory. (Tulving proposed the alternative term chronesthesia.) Mental time travel has been studied by psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, philosophers and in a variety of other academic disciplines. Major areas of interest include the nature of the relationship between memory and foresight, the evolution of the ability (including whether it is uniquely human or shared with other animals), its development in young children, its underlying brain mechanisms, as well as its potential links to consciousness, the self, and free will.
Overview, terminology, and relationship to other cognitive capacities Declarative memory refers to the capacity to store and retrieve information that can be explicitly expressed, and consists of both facts or knowledge about the world (semantic memory) and autobiographical details about one's own experiences (episodic memory). Tulving (1985) originally suggested that episodic memory involved a kind of 'autonoetic' ('self-knowing') consciousness that required the first-person subjective experience of previously lived events, whereas semantic memory is associated with 'noetic' (knowing) consciousness but does not require such mental simulation. It has become increasingly clear that both semantic and episodic memory are integral for thinking about the future. Mental time travel, however, specifically refers to the 'autonoetic' systems, and thus selectively comprises episodic memory and episodic foresight. The close link between episodic memory and episodic foresight has been established with evidence of their shared developmental trajectory, similar impairment profiles in neuropsychiatric disease and in brain damage, phenomenological analyses, and with neuroimaging. Mental time travel may be one of several processes enabled by a general scenario building or construction system in the brain. This general capacity to generate and reflect on mental scenarios has been compared to a theatre in the mind that depends on the working together of a host of components. Investigations have been conducted into diverse aspects of mental time travel, including individual differences relating to personality, its instantiation in artificial intelligence systems, and its relationship with theory of mind and mind-wandering. The study of mental time travel in general terms is also related to – but distinct from – the study of the way individuals differ in terms of their future orientation, time perspective, and temporal self-continuity.
Cultural and Linguistic Influences While the neural substrates for mental time travel may be universal, the habitual deployment of this capacity is influenced by language and culture. Linguistic patterns, such as the use of spatial metaphors (e.g., placing the future "behind" the body in Aymara) or grammatical structures like "future-time reference," can tune attention and bias how individuals represent and use time in decision-making. Furthermore, traditional event-based cultures demonstrate that mental time travel can operate over relative, situational chronologies rather than abstract, metric timelines.
Brain regions involved Various neuroimaging studies have elucidated the brain systems underlying the capacity for mental time travel in adults. Early fMRI studies on the topic revealed a number of close correspondences between remembering past experiences and imagining future experiences in brain activity.
fMRI mapping of brain regions Addis et al. conducted an fMRI study to examine neural regions mediating construction and elaboration of past and future events. The elaboration phase, unlike the construction phase, has overlap in the cortical areas comprising the autobiographical memory retrieval network. In this study, it was also found that the left hippocampus and the right middle occipital gyrus were significantly activated during past and future event construction, while the right hippocampus was significantly deactivated during past event construction. It was only activated during the creation of future events. This differentiation suggests the right hippocampus may specifically respond to the novelty of constructing a new event representation . Episodic future thinking involves multiple component processes: retrieval and integration of relevant information from memory, processing of subjective time, and self-referential processing. D'Argembeau et al.'s study found that the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex are the most activated areas when imagining future events that are relevant to one's personal goals than to unrelated ones. This shows that these brain regions play a role in personal goal processing, which is a critical feature of episodic future thinking.
Brain regions involved in the 'what' and 'where' of an event Cabeza et al. conducted a positron emission tomography (PET) scan study on a group of human test subjects to identify the brain regions involved in temporal memory, which is based on a linear progression of events. Since 'recollecting a past episode involves remembering not only what happened but also when it happened', PET scans were used to find the areas of the brain that were activated when trying to remember a certain word in a sequence. The results show that temporal-order memory of past events involves the frontal and posterior brain regions and item retrieval shows neural activity in the medial temporal and basal fore brain regions.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
