{"pk":21520,"title":"Remembered Futures and Anticipated Pasts: The Recursive Grammar of Mental Time Travel","subtitle":null,"abstract":"One feature of mental time travel is the ability to recursively embed temporal perspectives across different times: humans can remember how we anticipated the future and anticipate how we will remember the past. This recursive structure might be formalised in terms of a “grammar” that is reflective of but more general than linguistic notions of absolute and relative tense. Here I provide a foundation for this grammatical framework, emphasising a bounded (rather than unbounded) role of recursion in supporting mental time travel to a limited temporal depth and to actual and possible scenarios. Anticipated counterfactual thinking, for instance, entails three levels of mental time travel to a possible scenario (“in the future I will reflect on how my past self could have taken a different future action”) and is implicated in complex human decision-making. This perspective calls for further research into the nature and origins of recursive mental time travel.","language":null,"license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Cognition of Time; Event cognition; Memory; Representation"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xz0681s","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Jonathan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Redshaw","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Queensland","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T12:00:00-06:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21520/galley/11119/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21520/galley/14596/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21520/galley/21516/download/"}]}