Opinion
Evolutionary economics of mental time travel?

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What is the function of our capacity for ‘mental time travel’? Evolutionary considerations suggest that vivid memory and imaginative foresight may be crucial cognitive devices for human decision making. Our emotional engagement with past or future events gives them great motivational force, which may counter a natural tendency towards time discounting and impulsive, opportunistic behavior. In this view, whereas simple episodic memory provides us with a store of relevant, case-based information to guide decisions, mental time travel nudges us towards more restrained choices, which in the long term are advantageous, especially so given human dependence on cooperation and coordination.

Section snippets

Memory and imagination as decision-making processes

Many animals seem to have a capacity for some form of episodic recall, retrieving specific information about the ‘what, where and when’ of past experiences (1, 2, but see Ref. [3] for limits to such claims). Humans (and perhaps other animals) also engage in what has been called ‘mental time travel’ (MTT), a form of recall that allows one to re-experience, albeit in an attenuated form, situations previously encountered 4, 5. There is converging evidence that MTT is crucial to human decision

Why add MTT to episodic memory or imagination?

Functional models so far explain only why we are able to entertain information about past or possible situations, not why we also actually experience these situations. The reason for evolving MTT, as opposed to mere what-where-when knowledge, must lie in mental activity that is present in the former but not in the latter. In MTT, visual and auditory imagery combine with activation of emotional circuitry to create ersatz experience [13]. As Martin Conway and others have pointed out,

Cooperation is difficult, restraint is adaptive

Cooperation between non-genetically related individuals, as well as coordinated action involving many agents, are rare in nature and ubiquitous among humans (see Refs 25, 26 for surveys and models). Humans are also special in that they engage in nonopportunistic or other-regarding behaviors in which they benefit others without clear return in terms of their own fitness, like giving tips in restaurants that one will not visit again or helping perfect strangers find their way [27]. A wealth of

Imagined and recalled situations as counter-rewards

Several properties of MTT suggest that it may also play this role of a countermotivation device that offsets the effects of time discounting: (i) episodic recall and imagined futures are often noncontrolled – a situation or a plan can trigger specific time-travel experience without the need for deliberate retrieval or construction; (ii) once triggered, they generally activate emotional circuitry, leading to immediate rewards; (iii) these emotional rewards themselves are outside cognitive

Counter-reward function explains some features of time travel

In this view MTT can act as a calibration device by triggering emotional rewards that accurately reflect the emotional impact of the hypothetical or past situation and are immediate and, therefore, bypass the usual discounting of future consequences of actions. The conjecture, obviously, is worth considering only if it makes sense of a large amount of evidence and suggests new lines of inquiry.

The calibration model would predict that differences in the availability or salience of episodic

Functional models

Social interaction is a highly complex affair in which no two situations are ever identical, and identical pieces of information yield diametrical inferences depending on contextually appropriate memory activation, which is why conditioning and other general learning strategies seem insufficient. As one may expect a species with extensive cooperation possesses a unique suite of relevant cognitive capacities (e.g. memory for social situations [49] for the identity of the agents involved) as well

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