Recent research on autonoetic consciousness indicates that the ability to remember the past and the ability to project oneself into the future are closely related. The purpose of the present study was to confirm this proposition by examining whether the relationship observed between personality and episodic memory could be extended to episodic future thinking and, more generally, to investigate the influence of personality traits on self-information processing in the past and in the future. Results show that Neuroticism and Harm Avoidance predict more negative past memories and future projections. Other personality dimensions exhibit a more limited influence on mental time travel (MTT). Therefore, our study provide an additional evidence to the idea that MTT into the past and into the future rely on a common set of processes by which past experiences are used to envision the future.
“Mental time travel” (MTT), i.e., the capacity to remember our past experiences and to project ourselves into possible future events, is considered as a crucial ability for human-beings (Gilbert and Wilson, 2007, Schacter et al., 2007, Suddendorf and Corballis, 1997, Suddendorf and Corballis, 2007 and Wheeler et al., 1997). Mental time travel importantly involves autonoetic consciousness, i.e., “the kind of consciousness that mediates an individual’s awareness of his or her existence and identity in subjective time extending from the personal past through the present to the personal future” (Tulving, 1985, p. 1). Autonoetic consciousness is thought to allow not only the subjective experience associated with re-experiencing a past event but also the ability to project oneself forward in time to mentally “pre-experience” an event (Wheeler et al., 1997). However, although the ability to consciously remember past events (i.e., episodic memory) has been extensively investigated (Tulving, 2002 and Wheeler et al., 1997), relatively few studies have examined what Atance and O’Neill called “episodic future thinking,” which is “the ability to project the self forward in time to pre-experience an event” (Atance & O’Neill, 2001, p. 537). As argued by previous researchers, mental time travel into the future and into the past may rely on a common set of processes by which past experiences are used adaptively to imagine perspectives and events beyond those that emerge from the immediate environment (Atance and O’Neill, 2001, Buckner and Carroll, 2007, Hassabis and Maguire, 2007, Okuda et al., 2003 and Wheeler et al., 1997). The past may indeed constrain the generation of possible and likely futures, by supplying expectancies and determining what is plausible (Johnson & Sherman, 1990). Additionally, imagining future events involves combining some basic elements (e.g., actors, objects, and actions), some of which are extrapolations from past events while others come from general semantic knowledge, to generate potential scenarios (D’Argembeau and Van der Linden, 2006).
