Trends in Cognitive Sciences
OpinionTemporal Junctures in the Mind
Section snippets
Possible Worlds: Past, Present, and Future
[For] an intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature was composed … nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
– Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1814)
A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with … a tiny bit of radioactive substance … If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still
Temporal Junctures: Live and Expired
Our perspective on temporal junctures shares some similarities with Byrne’s notion of counterfactual fault lines [30,31], or the aspects of past events that people tend to mentally adjust to create alternative versions of the present. You may, for instance, spend an inordinate amount of time wondering what the present would look like if you had stayed together with a former romantic partner, or if an alternative candidate had won a crucial election. Whereas Byrne emphasises past divergence
Children’s Representations of Temporal Junctures
In developmental psychology [36, 37, 38, 39], as in comparative psychology [40, 41, 42], the basic capacity for mental time travel is often examined using variations of the two-rooms task [36] (also known as the spoon test [43]). In brief, children are first exposed to a problem in one room, before being taken to a second room where they later have the chance to select the solution (from among distractors) to take back to the first room. Experiments with two-rooms tasks have provided strong
Why the Protracted Development? A Representational Hierarchy
It may seem counterintuitive that children appear to represent future temporal junctures around 2 years before they can represent past temporal junctures and alternative versions of the present. After all, children have direct access to the present (via perception) and indirect access to the past (via memory), and yet they can only infer the future. One potential explanation for this developmental trajectory is that envisioning past and present alternatives requires greater inhibitory control
Are Representations of Temporal Junctures Uniquely Human?
The basic ability to predict uncertain future outcomes is evolutionarily ancient [80,81], and several influential unifying theories of neuroscience posit that animal brains are essentially prediction machines [82, 83, 84, 85, 86]. Common to these theories is the notion that brains function to register and minimise prediction error in an a posteriori manner: the future is predicted, and any discrepancies between the expected and actual outcome change the parameters of subsequent predictions.
Concluding Remarks
Many complex human behaviours are underscored by representations of future temporal junctures. Recently, we proposed the term metaforesight [68] to encapsulate the overarching capacity to reflect on alternative future possibilities and optimise behaviour accordingly. Perhaps the most obvious benefit of metaforesight is contingency planning: an agent that represents mutually exclusive future possibilities can try to ‘cover all bases’ by preparing not only for likely and desirable outcomes, but
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a University of Queensland Development Fellowship (UQFEL1832633) awarded to J.R.
Glossary
- Bayesian priors
- data-driven inferences about the likelihood of particular uncertain outcomes occurring in the future. In cognition, Bayesian priors may be experienced as intuitions about uncertain outcomes rather than rationally derived predictions.
- Causally overdetermined events
- events that were in fact caused by one antecedent but would have been caused by a second antecedent in the absence of the first.
- Counterfactual thinking
- accurately representing how the present version of reality would look
References (114)
How we know what not to think
Trends Cogn. Sci.
(2019)Preparing for what might happen: an episodic specificity induction impacts the generation of alternative future events
Cognition
(2017)- et al.
The functional theory of counterfactual thinking: new evidence, new challenges, new insights
Mental models and counterfactual thoughts about what might have been
Trends Cogn. Sci.
(2002)The development of counterfactual reasoning about doubly-determined events
Cogn. Dev.
(2018)- et al.
Mature counterfactual reasoning in 4-and 5-year-olds
Cognition
(2019) - et al.
Children’s and apes’ preparatory responses to two mutually exclusive possibilities
Curr. Biol.
(2016) Upward counterfactual thinking and depression: a meta-analysis
Clin. Psychol. Rev.
(2017)When planning to survive goes wrong: predicting the future and replaying the past in anxiety and PTSD
Curr. Opin. Behav. Sci.
(2018)What if? Neural activity underlying semantic and episodic counterfactual thinking
NeuroImage
(2018)
Making decisions with the future in mind: developmental and comparative identification of mental time travel
Learn. Motiv
Flexible planning in ravens?
Trends Cogn. Sci.
A taxonomy of mental time travel and counterfactual thought: insights from cognitive development
Behav. Brain Res.
Executive control and the experience of regret
J. Exp. Child Psychol.
The development of regret
J. Exp. Child Psychol.
The development of regret and relief about the outcomes of risky decisions
J. Exp. Child Psychol.
Regret and adaptive decision making in young children
J. Exp. Child Psychol.
A theory of regret regulation 1.0
J. Consum. Psychol.
With or without you: predictive coding and Bayesian inference in the brain
Curr. Opin. Neurobiol.
The acquisition of modal concepts
Trends Cogn. Sci.
Comparing the non-linguistic hallmarks of episodic memory systems in corvids and children
Curr. Opin. Behav. Sci.
Laplace’s demon and the adventures of his apprentices
Philos. Sci.
An introduction to real possibilities, indeterminism, and free will: three contingencies of the debate
Synthese
Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum
Review and suggested resolution of the problem of Schrödinger’s Cat
Contemp. Phys.
The evolution of foresight: what is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans?
Behav. Brain Sci.
Episodic counterfactual thinking
Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci.
Children's counterfactual reasoning about causally overdetermined events
Child Dev.
Belief and counterfactuality
Z. Psychol.
Young children from three diverse cultures spontaneously and consistently prepare for alternative future possibilities
Child Dev.
Preparatory responses to socially determined, mutually exclusive possibilities in chimpanzees and children
Biol. Lett.
Preparation for certain and uncertain future outcomes in young children and three species of monkey
Dev. Psychobiol.
Comparing chimpanzees' preparatory responses to known and unknown future outcomes
Biol. Lett.
Behavioral and neurophysiological correlates of regret in rat decision-making on a neuroeconomic task
Nat. Neurosci.
Mice learn to avoid regret
PLoS Biol.
Unique relations between counterfactual thinking and DSM–5 PTSD symptom clusters
Psychol. Trauma
Characterizing the subjective experience of episodic past, future, and counterfactual thinking in healthy younger and older adults
Q. J. Exp. Psychol.
Psychopathic individuals exhibit but do not avoid regret during counterfactual decision making
Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U S A
Remembering and imagining alternative versions of the personal past
Neuropsychologia
Dissociation between private and social counterfactual value signals following ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage
J. Cogn. Neurosci.
Counterfactual thought
Annu. Rev. Psychol.
Counterfactual thinking: from logic to morality
Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci.
The development of temporal concepts: learning to locate events in time
Timing Time Percept
Animal minds in time: the question of episodic memory
Thinking in and about time: a dual systems perspective on temporal cognition
Behav. Brain Sci.
Guessing imagined and live chance events: adults behave like children with live events
Brit. J. Psychol.
Children’s capacity to remember a novel problem and to secure its future solution
Dev. Sci.
To have and to hold: episodic memory in 3-and 4-year-old children
Dev. Psychobiol.
Assessing the role of memory in preschoolers' performance on episodic foresight tasks
Memory
Apes save tools for future use
Science
Cited by (33)
Many preschoolers do not distinguish the possible from the impossible in a marble-catching task
2024, Journal of Experimental Child PsychologyThree-year-old children's reasoning about possibilities
2023, CognitionA long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: How temporal are episodic contents?
2021, Consciousness and CognitionCitation Excerpt :What allows episodic simulations to fulfil such a large variety of cognitive functions? One important component of such simulations is their temporality, that is, their temporal orientation towards the future or the past (e.g. Redshaw, 2014; Redshaw & Suddendorf, 2020). Episodic simulations can be future- (e.g. Szpunar, Spreng, & Schacter, 2014) or past-directed (e.g. De Brigard, Addis, Ford, Schacter, & Giovanello, 2013).
When can young children reason about an exclusive disjunction? A follow up to Mody and Carey (2016)
2021, CognitionCitation Excerpt :Nonetheless, even if young children's behaviour is consistent with an understanding of inclusive “or” relationships, this need not necessarily imply that they approached the problem as an emerging logician would. It remains possible that they were simply generally uncertain about the contents of each pair of cups after the hiding events, while lacking the awareness that each pair denoted mutually exclusive alternatives with equal probabilities (Redshaw & Suddendorf, 2020). If so, this raises the question of why, in the show empty condition, the younger children seemed able to rule out cups C and D as options and select B instead.