Mental Time Travel : How time for future events is perceived. The various strategies used in the temporal location of future events

Abstract

Future mental time travel is the ability to transcend the present and project oneself into the future to pre-experience events. It is based on the recombination of content from episodic and semantic memory systems into novel future scenarios. In this thesis, I sought to explore how time was perceived, and more precisely, to discover how the temporal location of future events was inferred. In order to determine that, I asked participants to provide eight likely future events before providing their temporal locations (exact or approximated dates). They then had to indicate whether or not they had applied five strategies that were proposed to them as well as rate various characteristics of their events. I hypothesized that based on the similarities that research has uncovered to exist between past- and future-oriented mental time travel, similar strategies would be employed when inferring the temporal location of past and future events. As such, the strategies proposed to participants were comparable to those applied when locating past events in time. Results revealed that the future events were rated to be quite vivid, positive, important, likely to occur and relatively far in the future. Furthermore, the same strategies used in past-oriented mental time travel were indeed applied to locate future events in time, although in varying degrees. As a result, this revealed that as well as aiding in their construction, episodic and semantic memory systems likewise play a role in the temporal location of future events.