Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 20, Issue 3, September 2011, Pages 712-719
Consciousness and Cognition

Individual differences in time perspective predict autonoetic experience

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2011.03.006Get rights and content

Abstract

Tulving (1985) posited that the capacity to remember is one facet of a more general capacity—autonoetic (self-knowing) consciousness. Autonoetic consciousness was proposed to underlie the ability for “mental time travel” both into the past (remembering) and into the future to envision potential future episodes (episodic future thinking). The current study examines whether individual differences can predict autonoetic experience. Specifically, the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI, Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999) was administered to 133 undergraduate students, who also rated phenomenological experiences accompanying autobiographical remembering and episodic future thinking. Scores on two of the five subscales of the ZTPI (Future and Present-Hedonistic) predicted the degree to which people reported feelings of mentally traveling backward (or forward) in time and the degree to which they reported re- or pre-experiencing the event, but not ten other rated properties less related to autonoetic consciousness.

Highlights

► Do people vary in their experience of past and future episodic thought? ► Individual differences in time perspective were assessed in 133 young adults. ► Time perspective predicts the vividness of remembering and envisioning the future. ► Future-oriented people vividly experience remembering and envisioning the future. ► Present-Hedonistic orientated people also report vivid past and future experiences.

Introduction

Twenty-six years ago, Endel Tulving proposed that the human capacity for remembering could best be conceptualized as one facet of a more general capacity, which he termed autonoetic consciousness (Tulving, 1985). A recent collection of empirical studies has brought new attention to this proposal. In essence, this work suggests that remembering is best viewed from a wide-angle perspective, such that it is conceptualized as one manifestation of autonoetic consciousness, the other being its complementary capacity: the ability to envision potential future events. This latter capacity will be referred to here as episodic future thought (Atance and O’Neill, 2001, Szpunar, 2010), although other researchers have utilized different terms including episodic simulation (Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2008) and prospection (Buckner & Carroll, 2007).

Renewed interest in this broad conceptualization of episodic memory has arisen in part from the observation that groups of individuals who demonstrate episodic memory impairments tend also to demonstrate deficits in the capacity for episodic future thought. This observation, first made by Tulving (1985) in a single amnesic patient, has been extended to a second patient (Klein, Loftus, & Kihlstrom, 2002) and to a sample of five people with medial temporal lobe amnesia (Hassabis, Kumaran, Vann, & Maguire, 2007). Moreover, suicidally depressed individuals demonstrate impairments in both capacities (Williams et al., 1996), as do people with schizophrenia (D’Argembeau, Raffard, & Van der Linden, 2008), those with Alzheimer’s Disease (Addis, Sacchetti, Ally, & Budson, 2009) and even healthy older adults (Addis, Wong, & Schacter, 2008). Episodic memory impairments and deficits in episodic future thought seem to go hand-in-hand across different subject populations.

Might there exist a similar variation within the population of healthy young adults? That is, do there exist individual differences across healthy young adults that predict the phenomenological qualities accompanying remembering and episodic future thinking? In order to begin to address this important question, we examined the relation of time perspective (i.e., orientation to the personal past, present, and future, Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999) to people’s reported sense of subjective experience associated with mental time travel.

To assess time perspective, we administered the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI, Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999), which contains five subscales oriented toward classifying individual people’s perspective of time; specifically, the subscales related to the following five orientations: future, present-hedonistic, past-negative, past-positive, and present-fatalistic. The Future subscale measures a general concern for the future, including a focus on planning, future goals, achievement, and delay of gratification. The Present-Hedonistic subscale captures a pleasure-seeking, risk-taking orientation. The Past-Negative subscale measures degree of negative view of the past and is associated with cautiousness and conservatism. The Past-Positive subscale reflects a sentimental, positive attitude toward the past, often oriented toward family. The Present-Fatalistic subscale reflects a helpless, hopeless view of the future and life in general.

Individual differences in time perspective have been associated with behaviors such as risky driving (Zimbardo, Keough, & Boyd, 1997), tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drug use (Keough, Zimbardo, & Boyd, 1999), duration of homelessness (Epel, Bandura, & Zimbardo, 1999), and risky health behaviors (Henson, Carey, Carey, & Maisto, 2006). In general, those who are more future-oriented and less present-oriented partake in fewer risky behaviors.

The question here was not how time perspective affects outward behavior but whether it predicts how people experience remembering the past and imagining the future. For both remembering and episodic future thinking, an adaptation of the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ; Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye, 1988) was used to assess the degree to which people experienced the following twelve phenomenological characteristics: feelings of mentally traveling backward or forward in time; sound; effort required to bring the event to mind; feelings of re- or pre-experiencing the event; clarity of location; remembering or envisioning bodily movements; clarity of spatial arrangement of objects; clarity of spatial arrangement of people; smell/taste; degree to which the event is remembered or imagined as a coherent story; clarity of time of day; and visual details.

The MCQ questions are distinct from the ZTPI items. The MCQ questions ask participants to rate their phenomenological experience of a particular memory or future thought. For example, participants were asked to rate the degree to which they felt as though they had pre-experienced the specific future event they had just imagined. In contrast, the ZTPI asks participants to rate how well general statements relating to time characterize themselves. For example, participants rated the extent to which their own attitude about the future was characterized by the statement “You can’t really plan for the future because things change so much”. Because the MCQ and the ZTPI have such different focuses, any correlation between the two could not be explained by overlap in the questions.

Might individual differences in time perspective influence the phenomenological experience of episodic memories and episodic future thoughts? Other studies have shown that some individual differences can influence the phenomenological experience of remembering and episodic future thinking (e.g., D’Argembeau et al., 2010, D’Argembeau and Van der Linden, 2006, Quoidbach et al., 2008). However, no study has examined how all of the time perspectives captured by the ZTPI may influence phenomenological experiences and how this influence may be similar or different when remembering past events and imagining future events. The current study aims to answer these questions. In this study, participants remembered 10 past events of their lives and imagined 10 possible future events they might experience and rated those events on the twelve dimensions listed above. They then completed the entire ZTPI. A regression analysis explored the association of time perspective and the phenomenological experiences of episodic memory and episodic future thought.

Section snippets

Participants

One hundred and forty-seven Washington University undergraduate students participated in exchange for class credit. Data from 14 participants were dropped from the analysis due to failure to follow instructions or a significant amount of missing data, and therefore data from a total of 133 participants were included in the analysis.

Design

A 2 × 5 mixed design was used, with temporal orientation (past, future) manipulated within-participants and temporal distance [1 day (N = 25), 1 week (N = 26), 1 year (N = 24),

Results

Cronbach’s alpha was determined for each subscale as a measure of reliability. For the Future subscale, the alpha was .83; for Present-Hedonistic, .85; for Past-Positive, .79; for Past-Negative, .84; and for Present-Fatalistic, .62. Correlations between the subscales were also calculated. Almost all subscales were significantly correlated with each other. The largest correlation was between the future and present-hedonistic subscales, r = −.35, p < .01. The one exception was a non-significant

Discussion

Within a healthy young adult sample, individual differences in time perspective predicted differences in the phenomenological experience underlying remembering and episodic future thinking. Feelings of re-experiencing (and pre-experiencing) an event and feelings of mentally traveling backward and forward through time were captured by this inventory. Taken together, these measures can be considered as capturing the essence of the autonoetic experience (cf. D’Argembeau and Van der Linden, 2006).

Acknowledgments

This experiment was included as part of the first author’s master’s thesis under the direction of the second author. Thanks to Roddy Roediger and Pascal Boyer for serving on the master’s committee and for helpful discussion. Also thanks to Erika Carlson who provided advice on the statistical analysis.

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