discussionssss

Episodic memory: Mental time travel or a quantum 'memory wave' function?

Authors:

Manning, Jeremy R., ORCID 0000-0001-7613-4732 . Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, US, jeremy.r.manning@dartmouth.edu

Address:

Manning, Jeremy R., Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, US, 03755, jeremy.r.manning@dartmouth.edu

Source:

Psychological Review, May 20, 2021.

NLM Title Abbreviation:

Psychol Rev

Publisher:

US : American Psychological Association

Other Publishers:

US : Macmillan & Company

US : Psychological Review Company

US : The Macmillan Company

US : The Review Publishing Company

ISSN:

0033-295X (Print)

1939-1471 (Electronic)

Language:

English

Keywords:

events, episodic memory, mental time travel, text embedding

Abstract:

Where do we 'go' when we recollect our past? When remembering a past event, it is intuitive to imagine some part of ourselves mentally 'jumping back in time' to when the event occurred. I propose an alternative view, inspired by recent evidence from my lab and others, as well as by reexamining existing models of episodic recall that suggests that this notion of mentally revisiting any specific moment of our past is at best incomplete and at worst misleading. Instead, I suggest that we retrieve information from our past by mentally casting ourselves back simultaneously to many time points from our past, much like a quantum wave function spreading its probability mass over many possible states. This revised conceptual model makes important behavioral and neural predictions about how we retrieve information about our past, and has implications for how we study episodic memory experimentally. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

Document Type:

Journal Article

Subjects:

*Episodic Memory; *Experiences (Events); *Imagination; *Prediction; *Probability; Intuition; Models

PsycINFO Classification:

Learning & Memory (2343)

Population:

Human

Grant Sponsorship:

Sponsor: National Science Foundation, US

Grant Number: 1632738

Other Details: EPSCoR Award

Recipients: No recipient indicated

Conference:

Context and Episodic Symposium, 2019

Conference Notes:

Some of the work in this article was presented in a talk at the aforementioned conference.

Format Covered:

Electronic

Publication Type:

Journal; Peer Reviewed Journal

Publication Status:

Online First Posting

Publication History:

Accepted: Jan 30, 2021; Revised: Jan 12, 2021; First Submitted: Jan 16, 2019

Release Date:

20210520

Copyright:

American Psychological Association. 2021

Digital Object Identifier:

http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.mtsu.edu/10.1037/rev0000283

Accession Number:

2021-47824-001