University of Liège, Belgium.
University of Liège, Belgium.
Cognition. 2020 Dec;205:104416. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104416. Epub 2020 Aug 6.
While the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie episodic future thinking are increasingly well understood, little is known about how the temporal unfolding of events is represented in future simulations. In this study, we leveraged wearable camera technology to examine whether real-world events are structured and compressed in the same way when imagining the future as when remembering the past. We found that future events were simulated at proportionally higher speed than past events and that the density of experience units representing the unfolding of events was lower for future than for past episodes. Despite these differences, the nature of events influenced compression rates in the same way for past and future events. Furthermore, the perceived duration of both types of events depended on the density of represented experience units. These results provide novel insight into the mechanisms that structure the unfolding of events during future simulations.
虽然人们越来越了解支持情景式未来思维的认知和神经机制，但对于事件的时间展开如何在未来模拟中呈现，人们知之甚少。在这项研究中，我们利用可穿戴相机技术来检验在想象未来和回忆过去时，现实世界中的事件是否以相同的方式进行结构和压缩。我们发现，未来事件的模拟速度比过去事件快，并且代表事件展开的经验单位的密度对于未来事件比过去事件低。尽管存在这些差异，但事件的性质以相同的方式影响过去和未来事件的压缩率。此外，这两种类型的事件的感知持续时间都取决于所表示的经验单位的密度。这些结果为理解未来模拟中事件展开的机制提供了新的见解。
