Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 22, Issue 3, September 2013, Pages 742-755
Consciousness and Cognition

The time travelling self: Comparing self and other in narratives of past and future events

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.04.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Comparing memories and future events to understand role of self in future thinking.

  • Higher ratings of phenomenological quality in near past and future for self only.

  • Valence is more positive in future for self and close friend, but not other.

  • Life script narrative more common in the distant future, but do not add to valence.

Abstract

Mental time travel research emphasizes the connection between past and future thinking, whereas autobiographical memory research emphasizes the interrelationship of self and memory. This study explored the relationship between self and memory when thinking about both past and future events. Participants reported events from the near and distant past and future, for themselves, a close friend, or an acquaintance. Past events were rated higher in phenomenological quality than future events, and near self events were rated higher in quality than those about friends. Although future events were more positive than past events, only valence ratings for self and close friend showed a linear increase in positivity from distant past to future. Content analysis showed that this increase in positivity could not be ascribed to choosing events from the cultural life script. These findings provide evidence for the role of personal goals in imagining the future.

Introduction

Autobiographical memory research emphasizes the relationship between the self and memory processes. Decades of research have examined the role of the self in remembering the past; recent work has turned to investigating how we envision the future, and how future thinking is related to memory of the past. The experiment reported here assesses how memory-related processes and self-related processes together shape anticipated future events, which tend to be more positive (Sedikides & Gregg, 2008) but less detailed (Berntsen & Bohn, 2010) than memories of past events. We compared memories and anticipated future events for self and other to examine three processes involved in imagining future events: episodic memory, self-enhancement biases, and cultural life scripts. Each of these factors is discussed in turn.

Research on constructive episodic simulation (Schacter & Addis, 2007) examines the relationship between cognitive processes involved in recalling the past and imagining the future. Also referred to as ‘mental time travel’ (MTT, Suddendorf & Busby, 2005), the comparison of episodic recall and future episodic simulation has indicated that similar cognitive and neural mechanisms underlie recalling the past and simulating the future (e.g. Addis, Wong, & Schacter, 2007; Spreng & Grady, 2010; Szpunar, Watson, & McDermott, 2007; for a detailed review, see Schacter et al., 2012). Additionally, patients with damage-induced amnesia demonstrate difficulties imagining the future that mirror their inabilities to recall the past (Hassabis et al., 2007, Klein et al., 2002; but see Cooper, Vargha-Khadem, Gadian, & Maguire, 2011); this provides further evidence that these two processes are strongly related.

Simulating the future and remembering the past rely on overlapping systems. However, Addis, Pan, Vu, Laiser, and Schacter (2009) have suggested that episodic simulation of the future is a more difficult task than recalling the past. Future episodic simulation entails construction instead of retrieval and involves an unfamiliar rather than familiar setting (Arnold, McDermott, & Szpunar, 2011). Because of the added difficulty and unfamiliarity that comes with constructing a unique future event rather than simply retrieving one from episodic memory, memories of past events have been reported to contain more sensorial details, more visual imagery, and more clarity for the location of events than imagined future events (Berntsen and Bohn, 2010, D’Argembeau and Van der Linden, 2004). A number of studies suggest that future events contain fewer sensorial details than past events because of their novelty. For example, Gamboz, Brandimonte, and De Vito (2010) found that distant future events were rated as both less vivid and more novel than near future events, and contained less information about time and location, less clarity, and less sensorial detail than near and distant past events. Trope and Liberman’s (2003)temporal construal theory has similarly suggested that distant events are more schematic and less based on specific event details.

Spreng and Levine (2006) asked participants to think of past and future events in response to cue words, and to indicate when the event either happened or was expected to happen. They found that both past and future events demonstrated similar distributions such that participants were more likely to report events close to the present whether in the past or in the future. They also calculated the median time point used for past and future events, and found that that anticipated future events were reported as closer to the present than remembered past events; this suggests that, when considering the future, participants do not stray as far from the present as when they remember the past (Spreng & Levine, 2006). It is possible that the similarity to the present provided by temporal closeness aided participants in imagining future events. Thus, although future events recruit similar mental capacities as past events, they tend to exhibit lower imagistic quality because they require more mental work in supplying the details, involve novel scenarios, and encourage attention to a more limited amount of information. Events farther in the future require more construction as the settings become increasingly novel. Therefore, we would expect a decline in phenomenological details with time.

Episodic future thinking is also influenced by individuals’ motives and goals. D’Argembeau and Mathy (2011) developed a hierarchical model for constructing imagined future events based on current models of how memories are retrieved (e.g. Barsalou, 1988, Conway, 2005, Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Specifically, they demonstrated that imagined future events involve a protracted construction process similar to the one described in autobiographical memory (study 1), that cuing participants with future goals led to faster retrieval of future events (study 2), and further, that cuing participants with their own personal goals led to more episodic details in imagined future events (study 3). These studies suggest that personal goals and plans play an important role in imagining future events. Work by Rathbone, Conway, and Moulin (2011) further emphasizes the organizing role of the self. They found that both memories and future events cued by identity statements (e.g. I am cheerful, I will be a mother) clustered temporally around the times that these traits developed or were expected to be developed. This finding suggests that the self is an organizing feature in imagining future events, as in memory.

Furthermore, work by Shao, Yao, Ceci, and Wang (2010) suggests that personal goals can be even more important than episodic memory in structuring anticipated future events. They instructed participants to report two past episodes and imagine two future episodes, and to rate the valence of each episode. Participants also described their past, present, and future selves by completing blank statements beginning with the word “I.” To create a measure of self-concept, the researchers coded these statements as either personal or social. Shao et al. (2010) found a positive correlation between the number of personal (as opposed to social) “I” statements and valence of future events, but not the valence of past events, and this measure of self-concept correlated more strongly with valence of future episodes than valence of past episodes. This study demonstrates that simulations of future events are not simply replications of past memories into novel contexts, but are guided by personal goals and expectations for the future.

Because personal goals influence how people imagine their future, it is likely that future event simulation is affected by self-enhancement biases. People have a desire to see their lives as constantly improving (for reviews, see Sedikides and Gregg, 2008, Taylor and Brown, 1988). This pattern fits theories regarding enhancement biases and exaggerated optimism about the future (Markus & Nurius, 1986). Temporal self-appraisal theory (Wilson & Ross, 2001) states that people are motivated to see themselves as constantly improving, and will even denigrate their past selves to enhance their present selves. Research on future event simulation suggests that this pattern of constant self-improvement extends beyond the present to include imagined future events (D’Argembeau and Van der Linden, 2004, Shao et al., 2010). Thus, the processes of recalling the past and imagining the future not only involve applying knowledge from episodic memory to a novel future situation, but also involve a bias to construct one’s life story in the framework of a perpetually-improving self (D’Argembeau and Van der Linden, 2004) who is achieving desired goals (D’Argembeau and Mathy, 2011, Shao et al., 2010).

In addition to self-enhancement and episodic memory processes, cultural life scripts may influence the simulation of future events (Berntsen & Rubin, 2004) by guiding individuals to write about certain expected events. The cultural life script refers to a culturally shared knowledge of major life events that are expected to happen in a person’s life time, such as getting married or having children. When participants search for memories and imagined future events, the cultural life script can serve as a useful search mechanism. Berntsen and Jacobsen (2008) have found that, in a study of involuntary memories and imagined future events, increased temporal distance from the event raised the likelihood that a person would report a life script event in both the past and the future. Berntsen and Bohn (2010) elicited memories and imagined future events from participants and found that more distant events were more often related to a self-narrative, and included many life script events. Bohn and Berntsen (2011), however, only found a tendency to report life script events when describing one’s anticipated life story, but did not find a tendency to report life script events when generating possible future events in response to cue words.

Findings from studies that emphasize cultural life scripts raise the possibility that the positivity bias reported in studies of imagined future events emerges from the fact that participants are more likely to select life script events, and these events (e.g., graduating from college, marriage, birth of children) tend to be positive, especially amongst college-age participants (for a list of cultural life script events, see Rubin, Berntsen, & Hutson, 2009). Our central question in examining the relationship of future events to the life script was whether or not the bias towards more positive future events emerges simply as a result of selecting scripted future but not past events.

In this experiment, we compared memories and imagined future events for one’s self, a close friend, and a non-close friend in order to better understand the role of self-enhancement and cultural life scripts in memory and future thinking. By narrating past and future events for another person, participants engage in similar processes of episodic simulation of future events without experiencing the same self-enhancement motivations, and without access to the same phenomenological details of the events. However, because a person has positive feelings for close friends, and because some of the anticipated future events of the close friend may be shared and have similar valence for the self, two separate other conditions were created: one in which participants were instructed to write about a close friend and one in which they were instructed to write about a friend with whom the participants are no longer close.

We predicted that features associated with the phenomenal characteristics of an event would be related to richness of episodic detail that is generated; less detailed descriptions of future episodes as compared to memories of past episodes may indicate that future episodic simulation is more difficult that episodic recall. In contrast, emotional valence would be more affected by self-enhancement biases, resulting in more negative (or less positive) memories of past events and more positive future event simulations, for the self but not the other.

In addition, future events may be more positive because the cultural life script leads individuals to select overly positive future events. This would result in more positive future event simulations when one is thinking about cultural life script events than when imagining other types of future events. We carried out content analyses on participants’ past and future event narratives to examine the types of events reported by participants. We were interested in examining whether content analysis of reports of past memories and imagined future events would provide a deeper understanding of the types of events that participants were reporting, especially with regard to cultural life scripts. Analyzing the content of written narratives also provides an advantage over questionnaire data in that we could examine the actual memories or future simulations themselves instead of relying on the participants’ assessments of their memories and imagined future events. Thus, in addition to the questionnaire data reported, participants wrote full-length descriptions of each episode, which were then coded for the type of event and for whether or not it was a part of the life script.

Section snippets

Participants

A total of 177 undergraduates at Rutgers University participated (86 female, 89 male, two participants did not report gender, age, or ethnicity). Mean age was 19.00 years (SD = 2.11), ranging from 18 to 37 years. Reported ethnicity was 77 Caucasian, 13 African American, 54 Asian, 14 Hispanic or Latino, 1 Native American, 4 Middle Eastern, 8 bi-racial, and 4 ‘other.’ A preliminary analysis found no significant differences between participants of different ethnicities (all F’s < 1.28, all p’s > .27) or

Results

This section proceeds in the order of the three topics presented above, namely analyses of phenomenological quality, emotional valence, and event type. The first two sections begin by describing the properties of the scale used before reporting the tests conducted.

Discussion

This study investigated the role that personal goals and plans play in imagining future events. Results support the view that personal goals influence not only people’s memories of past events, but also how they envision events in the future. Four main findings contribute to this interpretation. First, higher ratings of the phenomenological quality of events in the near past and near future were found for self but not for events of friends. Second, ratings of valence indicate the expected

Conclusions

This study extends the literature on mental time travel in multiple ways. As discussed above, the comparison between self and two types of others enabled an empirical examination of factors involved in episodic future simulation and factors related to self-related biases. The examination of event type and life script memories made it possible to rule out competing explanations of the valence effects found. By contrasting past and future event narratives for oneself and for others, and by

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