It is about time: Conceptual and experimental evaluation of the temporal cognitive mechanisms in mental time travel

Martín-Ordás, Gema

doi:10.1002/wcs.1530

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 101 publications

(184 reference statements)

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“…Various researchers (Osvath and Martin-Ordas, 2014;Müller et al, 2017;Martin-Ordas, 2020;Martin-Ordas et al, 2020;van Leeuwen, 2021) have contributed evidence on the relationship between the experience of time and agency in the specific experience of non-human animals that supports the proposal advanced by Birch, Schnell and Clayton that a multidimensional framework is beneficial to the study of consciousness within the same animal species and across different animal species.…”

Section: Consciousness Is Integration Across Timementioning

confidence: 67%

Experience-Specific Dimensions of Consciousness (Observable in Flexible and Spontaneous Action Planning Among Animals)

Kaufmann

2021

Front. Syst. Neurosci.

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The multidimensional framework to the study of consciousness, which comes as an alternative to a single sliding scale model, offers a set of experimental paradigms for investigating dimensions of animal consciousness, acknowledging the compelling urge for a novel approach. One of these dimensions investigates whether non-human animals can flexibly and spontaneously plan for a future event, and for future desires, without relying on reinforcement learning. This is a critical question since different intentional structures for action in non-human animals are described as served by different neural mechanisms underpinning the capacity to represent temporal properties. And a lack of appreciation of this variety of intentional structures and neural correlates has led many experts to doubt that animals have access to temporal reasoning and to not recognize temporality as a mark of consciousness, and as a psychological resource for their life. With respect to this, there is a significant body of ethological evidence for planning abilities in non-human animals, too often overlooked, and that instead should be taken into serious account. This could contribute to assigning consciousness profiles, across and within species, that should be tailored according to an implemented and expansive use of the multidimensional framework. This cannot be fully operational in the absence of an additional tag to its dimensions of variations: the experience-specificity of consciousness.

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Section: Consciousness Is Integration Across Timementioning

confidence: 67%

Experience-Specific Dimensions of Consciousness (Observable in Flexible and Spontaneous Action Planning Among Animals)

Kaufmann

2021

Front. Syst. Neurosci.

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“…There is a rich literature examining when the ability to think about different times appears in human development and whether non-human animals have the ability to think about different times at all (e.g. McCormack, 2015;Friedman, 2003;2004;Hoerl & McCormack, 2019;Martin-Ordas, 2020;Redshaw, 2014). However, less attention has been paid to the cognitive mechanisms that enable this capacity in human adults.…”

Section: Temporal Information In Episodic Memory and Episodic Simulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: How temporal are episodic contents?

Mahr

Greene

Schacter

2021

Consciousness and Cognition

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A prominent feature of mental event (i.e. 'episodic') simulations is their temporality: human adults can generate episodic representations directed towards the past or the future. The ability to entertain event representations with different temporal orientations allows these representations to play various cognitive roles. Here, we investigated how the temporal orientation of imagined events relates to the contents (i.e. 'what is happening') of these events. Is the temporal orientation of an episode part of its contents? Or are the processes for assigning temporality to an event representation distinct from those generating its contents?In three experiments (N = 360), we asked participants to generate and later recall a series of imagined events differing in (1) location (indoors vs. outdoors), (2) time of day (daytime vs. nighttime), (3) temporal orientation (past vs. future), and (4) weekday (Monday vs. Friday).We then tested to what extent successful recall of episodic content (i.e. ( 1) and ( 2)) would predict recall of temporality and/or weekday information. Results showed that while recall of temporal orientation was predicted by content recall, weekday recall was not. However, temporal orientation was only weakly integrated with episodic contents. This finding suggests that episodic simulations are unlikely to be intrinsically temporal in nature. Instead, similar to other forms of temporal information, temporal orientation might be determined from such contents by reconstructive post-retrieval processes. These results have implications for how the human ability to 'mentally travel' in time is cognitively implemented.

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“…Similarly, in a study in which children did not have visual access to the items and, instead, needed to verbally “generate” the required item in response to an open‐ended question (e.g., “What would be a good fruit to bring back to the other room?”), only 5‐year‐olds performed significantly above chance (Atance et al, 2019; see also Moffett et al, 2018). Although removing visual access to the correct item at test may reduce the likelihood of children passing by using associative processes, children are nevertheless prompted (i.e., through questioning) to act with the future in mind (Atance et al, 2019; Martin‐Ordas, 2020). That is, children need not independently generate or “autocue” (Donald, 2004; Lyons et al, 2014; Suddendorf et al, 2018) a future event representation that is deliberately acted upon.…”

Section: Does the Spoon Test Measure Episodic Future Thinking?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving beyond “Spoon” tasks: When do children autocue their episodic future thought?

Atance

Ayson

Martín-Ordás

2023

WIRES Cognitive Science

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Much developmental (and comparative) research has used Tulving's Spoon test (i.e., whether an individual will select an item needed to solve a future problem) as the basis for designing tasks to measure episodic future thinking, defined as the capacity to mentally pre‐experience the future. There is, however, intense debate about whether these tasks successfully do so. Most notably, it has been argued that children may pass (i.e., select an item with future utility) by drawing on non‐episodic, associative processes, rather than on the capacity to represent the future, per se. Although subsequent developmental tasks have sought to address this limitation, we highlight what we argue is a more fundamental shortcoming of Spoon tasks: they prompt future‐directed action making it impossible to determine whether children have used their episodic future thinking to guide their behavior. Accordingly, we know little about children's thought about the future that is independently generated (i.e., without prompting), or autocued, and is subsequently reflected (and measurable) by children's actions. We argue that this capacity is a critical, and heretofore overlooked, transition in future‐oriented cognition that may not occur until middle childhood. We further hypothesize that it is reliant on children developing richer and more detailed future event representations, along with the necessary cognitive control to transform these representations into actions that serve to benefit their future selves. The time is ripe for researchers to explore this aspect of cognitive development and we suggest several novel approaches to do so. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development

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It is about time: Conceptual and experimental evaluation of the temporal cognitive mechanisms in mental time travel

Cited by 8 publications

References 101 publications

Experience-Specific Dimensions of Consciousness (Observable in Flexible and Spontaneous Action Planning Among Animals)

Experience-Specific Dimensions of Consciousness (Observable in Flexible and Spontaneous Action Planning Among Animals)

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: How temporal are episodic contents?

Moving beyond “Spoon” tasks: When do children autocue their episodic future thought?

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