Mental Time Travel: Episodic and Semantic Memory Generation in Future Thoughts

Abstract

Mental time travel (MTT) describes the uniquely human ability of recalling the past and imagining the future. Lately, MTT received growing interest because imagining past or future events can greatly incite emotional states. It has been suggested that future oriented mental images may play an important role in the maintenance of psychopathology. To understand this role, first the construction of future thoughts must become clear. One explanation is the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, which explains why episodic details are more common in past and future events than semantic events. The present study investigated whether there is support for this hypothesis or whether semantic memory might play a bigger role than expected. Also, the effect of temporal distance and valence of words was taken into account. It was predicted that temporal close events would contain more internal than external details in both past and future events. It was also predicted that positive future events would contain more internal details than negative future events. Furthermore, previous research has shown that individuals suffering from psychopathology tend to generate more external details, also known as overgeneralization. A positive correlation was expected between psychopathology and external details. A within-subjects design was used, including 32 students of University Utrecht. The students were asked to generate events, which were distinct in temporal direction, distance and valence of words – in order to measure whether they generate more internal (episodic) details or external (semantic) details, according to the coding scheme of the Autobiographical Interview. As was expected, more internal than external details were generated throughout all the conditions, which shows strong support for the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis. No effects were found for temporal distance and valence of words and no correlations were found between psychopathology and external details. These results show some support for the constructive episodic simulation, however more research is needed to properly measure the effect of temporal distance and valence of words and to measure the relationship of psychopathology and external details.