Cognitive processes underlying episodic mental time travel

Abstract

Episodic mental time travel, the mental construction of the past and future through remembering and imagining, is one of the cognitive abilities that have been extensively studied over the past 20 years. Although a range of component processes was proposed to underlie this unique ability, their relative contributions have remained largely unclear. The current study investigated the role of episodic memory, scene construction, self projection, and visual imagery in autobiographical memory, episodic future thinking, and episodic counterfactual thinking. Participants recalled and imagined important past, future, and counterfactual events and rated their phenomenological quality, and completed measures of several cognitive functions thought to underlie episodic mental time travel (i.e., episodic memory, scene construction, self-projection, and visual imagery). The number of episodic details found in the narratives of these events was also examined using an adapted version of the Autobiographical Interview. The results indicated that visual imagery and scene construction predicts the phenomenological quality and episodic details of autobiographical memories, respectively, while episodic memory predicts the subjective experience of episodic future events. The results were discussed with reference to the existing theoretical propositions.