Cole Scott N, Berntsen Dorthe
a Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences , Center on Autobiographical Memory Research (CON AMORE), Aarhus University , Aarhus , Denmark.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2016;69(2):273-84. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2015.1044542. Epub 2015 Jun 2.
Our overriding hypothesis was that future thinking would be linked with goals to a greater extent than memories; conceptualizing goals as current concerns (i.e., uncompleted personal goals). We also hypothesized that current-concern-related events would differ from non-current-concern-related events on a set of phenomenological characteristics. We report novel data from a study examining involuntary and voluntary mental time travel using an adapted laboratory paradigm. Specifically, after autobiographical memories or future thoughts were elicited (between participants) in an involuntary and voluntary retrieval mode (within participants), participants self-generated five current concerns and decided whether each event was relevant or not to their current concerns. Consistent with our hypothesis, compared with memories, a larger percentage of involuntary and voluntary future thoughts reflected current concerns. Furthermore, events related to current concerns differed from non-concern-related events on a range of cognitive, representational, and affective phenomenological measures. These effects were consistent across temporal direction. In general, our results agree with the proposition that involuntary and voluntary future thinking is important for goal-directed cognition and behaviour.
我们首要的假设是，相较于记忆，未来思考与目标的关联程度更高；将目标概念化为当前关注之事（即未完成的个人目标）。我们还假设，与当前关注相关的事件在一系列现象学特征上会与非当前关注相关的事件有所不同。我们报告了一项研究的新数据，该研究使用一种经过调整的实验室范式来考察非自愿和自愿的心理时间旅行。具体而言，在以非自愿和自愿检索模式（在参与者内部）引发自传体记忆或未来想法之后（在参与者之间），参与者自行生成五个当前关注之事，并判断每个事件是否与他们当前的关注相关。与我们的假设一致，与记忆相比，更大比例的非自愿和自愿未来想法反映了当前关注之事。此外，在一系列认知、表征和情感现象学测量方面，与当前关注相关的事件与非关注相关的事件存在差异。这些效应在时间方向上是一致的。总体而言，我们的结果与以下观点一致，即非自愿和自愿的未来思考对目标导向的认知和行为很重要。
