سفر ذهنی در زمان به گذشته و آینده بصورت غیرارادی (خود به خود)

Mental time travel (MTT) is the ability to mentally project oneself backward in time to relive past experiences and forward in time to pre-live possible future experiences. Previous work has focused on MTT in its voluntary (controlled) form. Here, we introduce the notion of involuntary (spontaneous) MTT. We examined involuntary versus voluntary and past versus future MTT in a diary study. We found that involuntary future event representations—defined as representations of possible personal future events that come to mind with no preceding search attempts—were as common as involuntary autobiographical memories and similar to them regarding cuing and subjective qualities. Future MTT involved more positive and idyllic representations than past MTT. MTT into the distant future/past involved more representations of cultural life script events than MTT into the immediate past/future. The findings are discussed in relation to cultural learning and MTT considered as a higher mental process.

Mental time travel refers to the ability to mentally project oneself backwards in time to re-live past personal experiences or forward in time to pre-live possible events in the future. It is usually described as a strategic and goal-directed process (Wheeler, Stuss, & Tulving, 1997). We here introduce the notion of involuntary mental time travel to refer to mental time travel that takes place spontaneously—that is, with no preceding conscious attempt at mentally projecting oneself forward or backward in time. Mental time travel has to do with the conscious act of remembering past events and imaging future ones, which is also called autonoetic awareness ( Wheeler et al., 1997). It is distinct from merely knowing that some event happened in the past (or is likely to happen in the future) without consciously re-living (or pre-living) the experience. Mental time travel and its ensuing autonoetic awareness are considered as the hallmark of episodic memory defined as a separate neurocognitive system ( Tulving, 2002 and Wheeler et al., 1997). Research on mental time travel in both its past and future forms has concentrated on voluntary (i.e., strategic and intentionally initiated) mental time travel. In such studies, the participants are typically asked to deliberately recall past experiences or deliberately construct representations of possible future events. For example, in standard episodic memory experiments, participants are asked to recall previously presented word lists. In typical autobiographical memory studies, participants are asked to deliberately recollect memories of personal events (or generate representations of future events) in response to word cues.