Mental Time Travel: The Accessibility of Events, influenced by Temporal Direction, Temporal Distance and Emotional Valence

Abstract

The unique possibility of the human race to engage in 'mental time travel' (MTT), in other words reliving the past and imagining or preliving the future, has always been a fascinating phenomenon. It is the ability to mentally project oneself backward in time to re-live past personal experiences or forward in time to pre-live possible events in the future. In a within-subjects design, this study examined whether temporal direction (past versus future), temporal distance (near versus distant), and emotional valence (positive versus negative) affect the accessibility of retrieving and generating events. Accessibility is defined as the ease whereby memories and possible future events are retrieved from the brain. Students at the Utrecht University (N=75) were asked to mentally re-experience or pre-experience twelve events that differed in temporal direction, temporal distance and valence. Reaction times were measured and used as an indicator for accessibility. The reaction times were submitted to a factorial 2x2x2 repeated measures ANOVA. It was found that future events are more accessible than past events, near events are more accessible than distant events and positive events are more accessible than negative events. However, the latter effect of valence was only found in recent events, in both past and future. These results can be used for further research into the accessibility of MTT.