Mnemicity versus temporality: Distinguishing between components of episodic representations.

Abstract

Human beings regularly “mentally travel” to past and future times in memory and imagination. In theory, whether an event is remembered or imagined (its “mnemicity”) underspecifies whether it is oriented toward the past or the future (its “temporality”). However, it remains unclear to what extent the temporal orientation of such episodic simulations is cognitively represented separately from their status as memory or imagination. To address this question, we investigated to what extent episodic simulations are distinguishable in recall by virtue of both temporal orientation and mnemicity. In three experiments (N = 360), participants were asked to generate and later recall events differing along the lines of temporal orientation (past/future) and mnemicity (remembered/imagined). Across all of our experiments, we found that mnemicity and temporality each contributed to participants’ ability to discriminate different types of event simulations in recall. However, participants were also consistently more likely to confuse in recall event simulations that shared the same temporal orientation rather than the same mnemicity. These results show that the temporal orientation of episodic simulations can be cognitively represented separately from their mnemicity and have implications for debates about the structure of episodic representations as well as the role of temporality in this structure.

Mnemicity: A Cognitive Gadget?

“…This is noteworthy because it suggests that people having nonbelieved memories do not change their assessment of the mnemicity of the episode in question: If they did, they would take themselves to be currently imagining instead of remembering. Instead, they continue to take themselves to remember but change their assessment of the reality of the remembered event (for further evidence distinguishing mnemicity from other aspects of episodic representations, see Mahr & Schacter, 2022; Mahr et al, 2021).…”

The computational and the representational language-of-thought hypotheses

“…Mahr (2020Mahr ( , 2022; see also Mahr & Csibra, 2018) argued that (in addition to their contents) episodic thoughts have (at least) five discrete constituents: Temporal orientation (is this event occurring in the past, present, or future? ; Mahr & Schacter, 2022;Mahr et al, 2021), specificity (is this a unique occurrence or a type of occurrence? ; Addis et al, 2009), subjectivity (who is the subject of this experience?…”

Stop me if you've heard this one before: The Chomskyan hammer and the Skinnerian nail

“…The hypothesis that episodic thoughts indeed exhibit these features crucially generates a package of unique predictions (for a first pass at testing role-filler independence, see Mahr et al, 2021; and for discreteness, see Mahr & Schacter, 2022). Even though research on the role of LoT in episodic thought is still in its inception, there are potentially large theoretical payoffs for taking LoTH seriously in this domain.…”