Phenomenal characteristics associated with projecting oneself back into the past and forward into the future: Influence of valence and temporal distance

Abstract

As humans, we frequently engage in mental time travel, reliving past experiences and imagining possible future events. This study examined whether similar factors affect the subjective experience associated with remembering the past and imagining the future.Participants mentally "re-experienced" or "pre-experienced" positive and negative events that differed in their temporal distance from the present (close versus distant), and then rated the phenomenal characteristics (i.e., sensorial, contextual, and emotional details) associated with their representations. For both past and future, representations of positive events were associated with a greater feeling of re-experiencing (or pre-experiencing) than representations of negative events. In addition, representations of temporally close events (both past and future) contained more sensorial and contextual details, and generated a stronger feeling of reexperiencing (or pre-experiencing) than representations of temporally distant events. It is suggested that the way we both remember our past and imagine our future is constrained by our current goals. One of the most fascinating achievements of the human mind is its ability to engage in mental time travel in order to mentally relive past experiences (Suddendorf & Busby, 2003;Tulving, 2002;Wheeler, Stuss, & Tulving, 1997). When mentally traveling back to the past, we may remember an event in considerable detail, for instance by "seeing" in our mind the location where this past experience took place as well as the persons and objects that were present, by remembering the unfolding of the event as well as what we felt or thought when experiencing it, and so forth. Such detailed sensorial and contextual (spatio-temporal) information is an essential aspect of memory because it provides the rememberer with a subjective "sense of self" in the past (Klein, 2001) and enables him or her to distinguish memories of events that have been personally experienced in the past from other kinds of representations such as dreams, imagined events, or beliefs (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). According to Tulving's most recent characterization of episodic memory (Tulving, 2002;Wheeler et al., 1997), the hallmark of episodic retrieval is what he terms "autonoetic" (self-knowing) consciousness, which is "the kind of consciousness that mediates an individual's awareness of his or her existence and identity in subjective time extending from the personal past through the present to the personal future" (Tulving, 1985, p. 1). Autonoetic consciousness is thought to allow not only the subjective experience associated with reexperiencing a past experience but also the ability to project oneself forward in time to mentally "pre-experience" an event (Wheeler et al., 1997). However, although many researchers have showed increased interest in the subjective experience of remembering, by investigating either states of awareness (e.g., Gardiner, 1988;Tulving, 1985) or phenomenal characteristics (e.g., Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye, ...

Impaired ability to imagine future pleasant events is associated with apathy in schizophrenia

“…Interestingly, the lower specificity was particularly marked for positive events, even after controlling for depression. It has been observed that healthy individuals imagine positive events as more specific and with a greater feeling of pre-experiencing them than negative events (D'Argembeau and Van der Linden, 2004). This positive bias has been interpreted as a way to create and maintain a positive self-concept.…”

The role of personal goals in autonoetic experience when imagining future events

“…In most of these studies, autonoetic consciousness is assessed by asking participants to rate their feeling of experiencing imagined events and feeling of travelling forward in time. 2 D'Argembeau and Van der Linden (2004) manipulated the emotional valence and temporal distance of imagined events. It was found that participants reported greater autonoetic feelings and more vivid mental representations when imagining positive rather than negative, and temporally close rather than distant, future events (see also Berntsen & Bohn, 2010;Rasmussen & Berntsen, 2013).…”

Regret as autobiographical memory

“…This is an important observation with quite broad implications. The studies of prospective thought by Newby-Clark and Ross (2003) and D"Argembeau and Van der Linden (2004) explicitly requested specific, episodic events, whereas participants in the present studies freely recalled whatever came to mind, and what came to mind tended to be general. As Conway (1992) has suggested, this level of representation is the most cognitively efficient and provides easiest access to the autobiographical memory knowledge base, and events at this level are brought to mind more easily during memory retrieval (Conway & Bekerian, 1987).…”

“…Thinking forwards and backwards in time engages similar cognitive processes and may even recruit similar neural substrates (Atance & O"Neill, 2001;Buckner & Carroll, 2007;Cabeza & St Jacques, 2007;Okuda et al, 2003;Schacter & Addis, 2007;Wheeler et al, 1997). D"Argembeau and Van der Linden (2004) found many perceptual and affective attributes were shared by specific past and future events elicited by wordcues. The phenomenology and specificity of both types of event were also mediated by temporal distance, such that temporally near past and future events evoked a stronger sense of being "re(pre)-experienced" and contained more sensorial and contextual detail than did temporally distant events.…”

“…People struggle to overcome the inertia of normality when thinking about the future, and because atypical events are more difficult to imagine than typical events, people tend to predict a future "where highly probable events occur too often and improbable events occur too infrequently" (Johnson & Sherman, 1990, p. 502). Future events certainly appear to be more generic (D"Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2004;Newby-Clark & Ross, 2003) and more likely to comprise culturally-scripted events (Berntsen & Jabobsen, 2008).…”