Odour-induced mental time travel into the past and future: Do odour cues retain a unique link to our distant past?

Abstract

Proustian memories, or memories spontaneously evoked by taste and odours, have been argued to be uniquely linked to our remote past. This view suggests an asymmetry between odour-cued memories and odour-cued representations of future events regarding their temporal distance to the present. We investigated the temporal distribution and other phenomenological qualities of autobiographical memories and future events employing a 2 (temporal direction: past vs future) × 3 (cue type: verbal, visual, and odour) mixed design. We found that while odour-evoked memories were predominantly from the first decade of life, the future condition showed a marked preponderance of odour-cued events in the upcoming year. Odour-evoked memories were also less specific than the verbal and visual conditions. The odour condition was responsible for interactions concerning coherency of the events and the events' significance to the life story. The results support the view that odours possess a unique ability to evoke remote autobiographical memories.

Inducing involuntary and voluntary mental time travel using a laboratory paradigm

“…According to previous studies (e.g., Addis et al, 2007Addis et al, , 2009Anderson et al, 2012;D'Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2004;Miles & Berntsen, 2011;Rasmussen & Berntsen, 2014), we had no firm predictions whether voluntary past events would be faster to generate than voluntary future ones. Due to these inconclusive results concerning voluntary MTT and the lack of previous data on the retrieval dynamics of involuntary future representations, an interaction for the latency variable was not predicted.…”

“…It is also reported that future MTT is more personally important to the self than past MTT (Addis, Wong & Schacter, 2008;Berntsen & Bohn, 2010). Finally, it has been demonstrated that future representations are temporally closer to the present than their mnemonic counterparts (Addis et al, 2008;Spreng & Levine, 2006; see also Berntsen & Jacobsen, 2008;Finnbogadόttir & Berntsen, 2011;Miles & Berntsen, 2011).…”

“…However, when measuring event generation speed, results have proved inconclusive, with some studies demonstrating slower latencies for future events (Miles & Berntsen, 2011;Anderson, Dewhurst & Nash, 2012, Experiments 1 and 2, although in Experiment 1 this difference depended upon cue imageability; Rasmussen & Berntsen, 2014) and some showing no statistically significant difference (Addis et al, , 2009D'Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2004;Anderson et al, 2012, Experiment 3). Consequently, it was an open question whether there would be less indications of cognitive effort (measured by latency) associated with past versus future voluntary re/construction.…”

“…The most reliable differences being that past events contain a greater level of vividness and sensoryperceptual detail (Berntsen & Bohn, 2010;D'Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2004, 2006Gamboz, Brandimonte, & de Vito, 2010;Hassabis, Kumaran, & Maguire, 2007) and more regularly refer to specific events (R. J. Anderson & Dewhurst, 2009;Berntsen & Jacobsen, 2008;Miles & Berntsen, 2011) than future representations. In contrast to memories, future constructions are also moderately novel, containing aspects of previous experience (Gamboz et al, 2010).…”

Review: Does maladaptive repetitive thinking affect characteristics of mental time travel?

“…Although Tulving originally used the term MTT to refer to mentally travelling to episodic (i.e., specific) events in the past or future (Tulving, 2002), studies have shown that individuals sometimes identify more general This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Nordic Psychology, 65:2, 137-165, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/19012276.2013 events during MTT (e.g. Miles & Berntsen, 2011). Hence, we use the term MTT as referring to mentally travelling to both specific and general past and future events.…”