تفاوت های فردی در پدیدارشناسی سفر ذهنی در زمان: اثر تصاویر زنده بصری و استراتژی تنظیم احساسات

It has been claimed that the ability to remember the past and the ability to project oneself into the future are intimately related. We sought support for this proposition by examining whether individual differences in dimensions that have been shown to affect memory for past events similarly influence the experience of projecting oneself into the future. We found that individuals with a higher capacity for visual imagery experienced more visual and other sensory details both when remembering past events and when imagining future events. In addition, individuals who habitually use suppression to regulate their emotions experienced fewer sensory, contextual, and emotional details when representing both past and future events, while the use of reappraisal had no effect on either kind of events. These findings are consistent with the view that mental time travel into the past and into the future relies on similar mechanisms.

As humans, we frequently engage in “mental time travel,” remembering our past experiences and projecting ourselves into possible future events (Suddendorf and Corballis, 1997 and Wheeler et al., 1997). When traveling backwards in time, we may remember an event with considerable detail, for instance by “seeing” in our mind the location where the event took place and the persons and objects that were present, remembering what we thought during that event, feeling what we felt, and so forth. These details give us the subjective experience of mentally reliving a past event—a feeling of “warmth and intimacy” as William James wrote (James, 1890)—which is the hallmark of episodic memory (Tulving, 2002 and Wheeler et al., 1997). This subjective experience has been intensely investigated in recent years, by asking people to rate the phenomenal characteristics of their memories (e.g., Johnson et al., 1988 and Rubin et al., 2003) or to report their states of awareness during memory retrieval (e.g., Gardiner, 1988 and Tulving, 1985). By contrast, surprisingly few studies have examined the subjective experience associated with projecting oneself forward in time to pre-experience an event, or what has been called “episodic future thinking” (Atance & O’Neill, 2001).