Rasmussen Katrine W, Berntsen Dorthe
Center on Autobiographical Memory Research, Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 9, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark,
Mem Cognit. 2014 Oct;42(7):1063-75. doi: 10.3758/s13421-014-0414-1.
Mental time travel (MTT) is the ability to mentally project oneself backward or forward in time, in order to remember an event from one's personal past or to imagine a possible event in one's personal future. Recent work has suggested that, although past and future MTT may rely on shared neurocognitive substrates, the two temporal directions may interact differently with components of this underlying system. Here, we asked 151 participants to recall or imagine past and future autobiographical events in response to high- and low-imageable cue words. The results showed that high- and low-imageable cued events differed markedly on almost all measures, suggesting that imagery acts as a facilitator when constructing both past and possible future events. In line with previous work, future events less often referred to specific events, contained fewer details, and were more positive and idyllic than past events. However, these main effects were qualified by a number of interactions. In particular, we found an increased effect of cue imageability for past as compared to future events, suggesting that the generation of past events is more sensitive to the ability of the cues to invoke the sensory components of the encoding context, whereas the construction of future events is more driven by context-independent schemata.
心理时间旅行（MTT）是指个体在心理上把自己投射到过去或未来的能力，目的是回忆个人过去的事件或想象个人未来可能发生的事件。最近的研究表明，尽管过去和未来的心理时间旅行可能依赖于共同的神经认知基础，但这两个时间方向与这个潜在系统各组成部分的相互作用方式可能不同。在此，我们让151名参与者根据高意象性和低意象性的提示词回忆或想象过去和未来的自传体事件。结果显示，高意象性和低意象性提示的事件在几乎所有指标上都有显著差异，这表明意象在构建过去和可能的未来事件时都起到了促进作用。与之前的研究一致，未来事件较少涉及具体事件，包含的细节较少，并且比过去事件更积极、更理想化。然而，这些主效应受到一些交互作用的影响。特别是，我们发现与未来事件相比，过去事件的提示意象性效应增强，这表明过去事件的生成对提示词唤起编码情境中感觉成分的能力更敏感，而未来事件的构建更多地由与情境无关的图式驱动。
