Mental time travel is the capacity to imagine the autobiographical past and future. Schizotypy is a dimensional measure of psychosis-like traits found to be associated with creativity and imagination. Here, we examine the phenomenological qualities of mental time travel in highly schizotypal individuals. After recollecting past episodes (autobiographical memory) and imagining future events (episodic future thinking), those scoring highly on positive schizotypy reported a greater sense of ‘autonoetic awareness,’ defined as a greater feeling of mental time travel and re-living/‘pre-living’ imagined events. Furthermore, in contrast to other sensory domains, imagery of the past and future episodes contained more olfactory detail in these high scorers. The results are discussed in relation to previous reports of anomalous olfactory experiences in schizotypy and heightened vividness of olfactory imagery in post-traumatic stress disorder, for which schizotypy is a risk factor.
Mental time travel refers to “the faculty that allows humans to mentally project themselves backwards in time to re-live, or forwards to pre-live events” (Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007, p. 299). Re-living is a general property of autobiographical memory and, in humans, is accompanied by a particular type of consciousness, referred to as ‘autonoetic awareness’ (Tulving, 1985). It is this awareness which forms the basis of our sense of temporally extended beings, stretching from an autobiographical past to a hypothetical future. The creative activity of imagining future episodes has been the basis of a number of recent experimental studies in cognitive psychology, and intriguingly, involves not only similar psychological processes (Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2003 and Greenberg and Rubin, 2003), but also, overlapping neural substrates as remembering past events (Addis et al., 2006 and Szpunar et al., 2007). The subjectively experienced qualities of mental time travel have also been examined (D’Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2004), and more recently, the personality and mood variables associated with particularly vivid autobiographical or future-episodic thinking have been delineated (e.g. Quoidbach, Hansenne, & Mottet, 2008). For example, the ability to form vivid visual images and the use of certain emotion regulation strategies influence the sensory vividness with which past and future images are imagined (D’Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2006). Aspects of trait dissociation may also determine a tendency to generate future mental images (Vannucci & Mazzoni, 2009).
