آینده نگری و گذشته نگری برای سفر ذهنی در زمان: پیدایش یادآوری اپیزودیک و چرخش ذهنی در کودکان ساله 5 تا 8

We investigate the common development of children’s ability to “look back in time” (retrospection, episodic remembering) and to “look into the future” (prospection). Experiment 1 with 59 children 5 to 8.5 years old showed mental rotation, as a measure of prospection, explaining specific variance of free recall, as a measure of episodic remembering (retrospection) when controlled for cued recall. Experiment 2 with 31 children from 5 to 6.5 years measured episodic remembering with recall of visually experienced events (seeing which picture was placed inside a box) when controlling for recall of indirectly conveyed events (being informed about the pictures placed inside the box by showing the pictures on a monitor). Quite unexpectedly rotators were markedly worse on indirect items than non-rotators. We speculate that with the ability to rotate children switch from knowledge retrieval to episodic remembering, which maintains success for experienced events but has detrimental effects for indirect information.

We naturally speak of “looking back on past events” or “looking forward to the future.” Clearly, we cannot literally look back or forward in time ( Martin, 2001). We cannot see the future or the past in the same way as we see an event unfolding in front of us or behind us. The best we can do to capture past or future experiences of an event is to re-experience the event (retrospection), or imagine experiencing a future event (prospection). 1 The ability to retrospect in this sense has become a central feature for episodic memory with Tulving’s (1985) introduction of “autonoetic consciousness”, namely the awareness that remembering consists of “calling back into consciousness a seemingly lost state that is then ‘immediately recognized as something formerly experienced’ (Ebbinghaus, 1885, p. 1).” Philosophers spoke of “experiential memory,” at least since Locke (Owens, 1996). Although the different terms all capture the phenomenon adequately, and “retrospection” does so in nice juxtaposition to “prospection,” we prefer “episodic remembering” as our standard term. The choice of “remembering”, rather than “memory” is to emphasise that it is more than just retrieval of knowledge about a past episode. It is a re-experiencing of that episode. This distinction is also brought out by the notion of “mental time travel” (MTT: Suddendorf and Corballis, 1997 and Wheeler et al., 1997): one has to not just retrieve information about the past or think about the likely future. It requires projecting oneself as an experiencing agent into the past or future. This distinction is also akin to the difference between having a theory of mind (Churchland, 1984 and Gopnik and Astington, 1988) as opposed to simulating one’s own (or other people’s) mental processes (Goldman, 2006, Gordon, 1986 and Heal, 1986).