Psychology of Learning and Motivation (eBook)

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2015 | 1. Auflage
238 Seiten
Elsevier Science (Verlag)
978-0-12-802434-8 (ISBN)

Psychology of Learning and Motivation publishes empirical and theoretical contributions in cognitive and experimental psychology, ranging from classical and instrumental conditioning to complex learning and problem solving. Each chapter thoughtfully integrates the writings of leading contributors, who present and discuss significant bodies of research relevant to their discipline. Volume 63 includes chapters on such varied topics as memory and imagery, statistical regularities, eyewitness lineups, embodied attention, the teleological choice rule, inductive reasoning, causal reasoning and cognitive and neural components of insight.

Volume 63 of the highly regarded Psychology of Learning and Motivation series
An essential reference for researchers and academics in cognitive science
Relevant to both applied concerns and basic research

Psychology of Learning and Motivation publishes empirical and theoretical contributions in cognitive and experimental psychology, ranging from classical and instrumental conditioning to complex learning and problem solving. Each chapter thoughtfully integrates the writings of leading contributors, who present and discuss significant bodies of research relevant to their discipline. Volume 63 includes chapters on such varied topics as memory and imagery, statistical regularities, eyewitness lineups, embodied attention, the teleological choice rule, inductive reasoning, causal reasoning and cognitive and neural components of insight. Volume 63 of the highly regarded Psychology of Learning and Motivation series An essential reference for researchers and academics in cognitive science Relevant to both applied concerns and basic research

Chapter Two

The Role of Context in Understanding Similarities and Differences in Remembering and Episodic Future Thinking

Kathleen B. McDermott1 and Adrian W. Gilmore Department of Psychology, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA
1 Corresponding author: E-mail: kathleen.mcdermott@wustl.edu

Abstract

Remembering events from one's lifetime (autobiographical remembering) and envisioning events one might experience in the future (episodic future thought) call upon many similar cognitive processes, yet humans can routinely distinguish between the two. How can we understand their similarities and differences (in phenomenological and processing terms)? This chapter suggests that the greater accessibility of contextual associations for remembered events than imagined events plays a key role in understanding this puzzle, and we present behavioral and neuroimaging evidence that converges on this conclusion.

Keywords

Autobiographical memory; Autonoetic consciousness; Context; Contextual associations; Episodic future thought; Imagery; Prospection; Remembering

1. Introduction

Estimates suggest that people spend up to half of their awake time each day thinking about the past or the future (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010). Many such thoughts are episodic: they involve imagining oneself in a specific place, participating in an activity. Episodic thoughts about the future are likely functionally important in that they facilitate goal achievement (Pham & Taylor, 1999, Taylor, 2011). This chapter is concerned with how we go about this ordinary, yet important, set of processes.

Specifically, this chapter reviews the emerging evidence that this type of future-oriented thinking involves cognitive processes very similar to—yet distinct from—those engaged during autobiographical memory retrieval. The primary contribution is a consideration of how the similarities and differences in episodic future thought and remembering can be conceptualized in terms of underlying cognitive processes.

The chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the concept of episodic future thought and its origins. Section 3 considers memory-impaired populations and describes how complementary deficits in episodic future thought have been observed in people with profound and subtle memory impairments. In Section 4, we review conceptual issues (e.g., what episodic future thought is not and some initial hypotheses about the source of the strong similarities between episodic future thought and remembering). We then discuss individual differences in episodic future thought within healthy young adults (Section 5). We discuss what direct contrasts of the phenomenological reports accompanying episodic future thought and remembering can reveal about their relation (Section 6), and then consider how functional neuroimaging studies have informed our understanding of the relation between the two sets of processes (Section 7). We then discuss the construct of contextual associations and our view of the important role context plays in understanding the similarities between episodic future thought and remembering. Specifically, we review studies that show how a manipulation of the familiarity of context (via manipulating familiarity of the spatial setting) can alter the similarity of episodic future thought and remembering in predictable ways (Section 8). Further, we review an emerging literature that demonstrates that contextual setting can also be used to understand some of the differences that can be seen between remembering and episodic future thought (Section 9). We conclude with a section summarizing the key points made in this review.

2. Episodic Future Thought: The Concept

In 1985, Endel Tulving published a seminal paper in which he proposed that humans can differentiate between “remembering” and “knowing” events that happened in their personal past (Tulving, 1985). Specifically, Tulving's idea was that remembering carries rich episodic detail, whereas knowing relies on less personal, fact-like experiences (e.g., one could know they saw a picture previously in much the same way that one knows one's mailing address).

Although this “remember/know” distinction is the paper's legacy, the bulk of the article focused on the broader issue of the importance of (and up to that point, the relative neglect of) consciousness in memory. Specifically, the article proposed that “autonoetic” (self-knowing) consciousness enables the “special phenomenal flavor” of remembering (p. 3). In criticizing the field's avoidance of dealing directly with the slippery concept of consciousness, Tulving further noted that “One might think that memory should have something to do with remembering, and remembering is a conscious experience” (p. 1, italics in original). Hence, Tulving posited that this special form of consciousness—autonoetic consciousness—is a capacity that enables the rich recollective experience that accompanies remembering.

Autonoetic consciousness was further proposed to enable a second type of conscious experience: the ability to envision events that might take place in one's personal future. This capacity has since been labeled episodic future thought (Atance & O'Neill, 2001), and also referred to as episodic simulation (Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2007), prospection (Buckner & Carroll, 2007; Gilbert & Wilson, 2007), and pre-experiencing (Botzung, Denkova, & Manning, 2008). Following the logic of McDermott, Szpunar, and Arnold (2011), we use episodic future thought, in part due to its similarity to the concept and term episodic memory (Szpunar & McDermott, 2008b; Tulving, 1983, 2002).

The evidence for this capacity of human consciousness was primarily a case study of an amnesic patient, currently known as K.C. (but referred to as N.N. in Tulving, 1985). K.C. had profound neurological damage throughout his brain as a result of a motorcycle accident. Despite the diffuse damage, he had average intelligence, could carry on a conversation, perform basic algebra, and had normal semantic and short-term memory. His long-term memory, however, was quite impaired. That is, K.C. had profound global amnesia: K.C. could not remember a single event from his lifetime (Rosenbaum et al., 2005; Rosenbaum, McKinnon, Levine, & Moscovitch, 2004), regardless of whether the event happened 10 minutes, 10 months, or 10 years earlier (or more). He simply could not remember. The primary novel observation that sets the Tulving (1985) article apart from other articles about amnesic patients, however, was the observation that K.C. could not do “mental time travel” of any sort. That is, not only could he not recollect the past, but also he could not envision the future in any kind of specific way. He could not imagine what he might do tomorrow, although he did understand the question and the concept of the future (Craver, Kwan, Steindam, & Rosenbaum, 2014), and could describe quite poignantly what it felt like when he tried to imagine the future—that it felt “blank” (Tulving, 1985).

This pair of deficits—inability to recollect events from the past and to envision events in the future—led Tulving to propose that a single common capacity must underlie both abilities. Specifically, he suggested that amnesia be considered a “derangement of consciousness and not just a derangement of memory for past events” (Tulving, 1985, p. 5). As mentioned previously, Tulving named this specific type of consciousness autonoetic consciousness (with autonoetic derived from the Greek terms auto and noesis to mean self-knowing).

This proposal is reminiscent of a suggestion made by Lidz (1942), who noted that episodes are not experienced in isolation; rather, in order for an episode to be fully appreciated in the moment, the experience must be integrated into the broader experiences of one's lifetime (see also Ingvar, 1985). In the absence of that ability to integrate the present with the past and future (as in amnesia), Lidz proposed, current experiences are not fully lived. To fully experience an episode, “it must be woven into the experiences of one's life, as well as be hitched to what precedes and follows” (Lidz, 1942, p. 595). Because people with amnesia lack this integrative ability, Lidz argued, “the past cannot be fully utilized … the future must remain even hazier, more vague, and more confused. [The amnesic patient] is almost marooned in the moment” (p. 596). The ability to place episodes in a larger spatiotemporal context and the importance of that context for understanding memory are the primary focus of this chapter.

3. Similarities in Memory-Impaired Populations

3.1. Amnesia

The initial impetus for investigating episodic future thought and its relation to memory came from the literature on amnesia, as reviewed above. As such, we review here more recent studies of amnesic patients following on the observations by Tulving. One such amnesic patient, D.B., has been investigated by Klein and colleagues (Klein, Loftus, & Kihlstrom, 2002; Klein, Rozendal, & Cosmides, 2002), who established that D.B. had deficits not only in remembering but also in envisioning himself in future episodes. Importantly, D.B....

Erscheint lt. Verlag	8.6.2015
Mitarbeit	Herausgeber (Serie): Brian H. Ross
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Allgemeine Psychologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Pädagogische Psychologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Test in der Psychologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Verhaltenstherapie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
ISBN-10	0-12-802434-8 / 0128024348
ISBN-13	978-0-12-802434-8 / 9780128024348

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