Making decisions with the future in mind: Developmental and comparative identification of mental time travel

Schloerscheidt

Consciousness and Cognition

2016

Citation for published version (APA):Speth, J., Schloerscheidt, A. M., & Speth, C. (2016). As we fall asleep we forget about the future: a quantitative linguistic analysis of mentation reports from hypnagogia. Consciousness and Cognition, 45, 235-244. DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2016.08.014 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in Discovery Research Portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from Discovery Research Portal for the purpose of private study or research.• You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain.• You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. AbstractWe present a quantitative study of mental time travel to the past and future in sleep onset hypnagogia. Three independent, blind judges analysed a total of 150 mentation reports from different intervals prior to and after sleep onset. The linguistic tool for the mentation report analysis grounds on established grammatical and cognitive-semantic theories, and proof of concept has been provided in previous studies. The current results indicate that memory for the future, but not for the past, decreases in sleep onset -thereby supporting preliminary physiological evidence at the level of brain function. While recent memory research emphasizes similarities in the cognitive and physiological processes of mental time travel to the past and future, the current study explores a state of consciousness which may serve to dissociate between the two. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

As we fall asleep we forget about the future: A quantitative linguistic analysis of mentation reports from hypnagogia

Schloerscheidt

Consciousness and Cognition

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

“…Although the seeds of the scientific study of mental time travel were sown in the 20th century (1)(2)(3)(4)(5), it was only recently that its systematic investigation was launched. Several different approaches have been pursued, including behavioral/cognitive analyses (6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12), studies using functional neuroimaging techniques (13)(14)(15)(16), as well as electrophysiological studies (17).…”

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confidence: 99%

Consciousness of subjective time in the brain

Nyberg

Kim

Habib

et al. 2010

146

121

"Mental time travel" refers to conscious experience of remembering the personal past and imagining the personal future. Little is known about its neural correlates. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored the hypothesis that mental time travel into "nonpresent" times (past and future) is enabled by a special conscious state (chronesthesia). Well-trained subjects repeatedly imagined taking one and the same short walk in a familiar environment, doing so either in the imagined past, present, or future. In an additional condition, they recollected an instance in which they actually performed the same short walk in the same familiar setting. This design allowed us to measure brain activity correlated with "pure" conscious states of different moments of subjective time. The results showed that the left lateral parietal cortex was differentially activated by nonpresent subjective times compared with the present (past and future > present). A similar pattern was observed in the left frontal cortex, cerebellum, and thalamus. There was no evidence that the hippocampal region is involved in subjective time travel. These findings provide support for theoretical ideas concerning chronesthesia and mental time travel.episodic memory | autonoetic consciousness | imagined time | parietal lobule | intraparietal sulcus

“…According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, a critical function of autobiographical memory is to imagine possible future events and plans (Addis, Wong, & Schacter, 2007;Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2007). In fact, it has been argued that the ability to remember evolved from the need to generate plans and actions for the future (e.g., Suddendorf & Busby, 2005;Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997, 2007 and that the ability to generate future simulations may have been given adaptive priority . Consistent with the idea that past and future autobiographical elaboration have overlapping cognitive processes, recent studies have shown that the neural signatures of remembering the past (past elaboration) are similar to those of imagining the future (future elaboration) (e.g., Addis et al, 2007;Szpunar, Watson, & McDermott, 2007), suggesting overlapping processes between past and future events.…”

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confidence: 99%

Separating past and future autobiographical events in memory: Evidence for a reality monitoring asymmetry

McDonough

Gallo

2009

Memory & Cognition

After thinking about the past and imagining the future, how do people separate these real and imagined events in memory? We had subjects engage in past and future autobiographical elaboration, then later take memory tests that required them to recollect these earlier generated events. In Experiment 1, testing memory for previously generated past or future autobiographical events led to fewer source memory confusions than did an elaborative control task, suggesting that the distinctive features of autobiographical elaboration improved subsequent retrieval monitoring accuracy. In Experiment 2, we directly compared retrieval monitoring accuracy for previously generated past and future autobiographical events and found that subjects made fewer source confusions when searching memory for future events. This asymmetry suggests that the features characterizing future elaborations (e.g., cognitive operations) were used more effectively during reality monitoring than were the features characterizing past elaborations (e.g., perceptual details), and has implications for future-oriented theories of memory.